As I recently reported in Publishers Weekly Writers for the Sea is a new organization formed on June 8, 2015–World Oceans Day–and already making a splash offering many enthralling ways of describing our salty blue marble planet. What prompted the creation of Writers for the Sea?
“Who hears the fishes when they cry?” asked Henry David Thoreau in 1839. The following year, Richard Henry Dana Junior’s Two Years Before the Mast, about a sea journey to California and back to Boston, became a nationwide bestseller. Then, in 1851, Dana’s friend Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick to little acclaim; it would only come to be known as a classic of American literature years after Melville died a poor and disappointed man. Still later, John Steinbeck wrote about his scientific expedition along the coast of Baja with Monterey marine biologist Ed Rickets in The Log of the Sea of Cortez (he also thinly disguised his friend as Doc in Cannery Row). Ricketts himself wrote a defining textbook of ocean science, Between Pacific Tides.
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