Two of the greatest hunting stories in American Literature, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and William Faulkner's "The Bear," written not quite a hundred years apart, refl ect two different stages in man's struggle against nature in the New World. In Melville's novel nature, incarnate in the shape of a great albino whale, is invincible and believed to be immortal just as wild nature was believed to be inexhaustible in America at the middle of the nineteenth century. In Faulkner's story Old Ben, the legendary Mississippi black bear, also symbolizes nature, but, unlike Melville's white whale, the bear is mortal. What had seemed inconceivable to many at the middle of the nineteenth century had become all too clear by the middle of the twentieth: Man with his increased numbers, insatiable appetites and technological power had gained the ability to destroy wild nature. These stories by two great American writers are fi ction, but they confront the reader with a tragic reality: From the moment Columbus' three small ships sighted the island of San Salvador in the Caribbean wild nature in America was doomed. The mad captain Ahab's battle with Moby Dick was only an episode in the epic struggle that followed; the death of Old Ben with the knife of a wild man in his heart was the finale.
About the Author: Charles Hughes, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, spent four years in the U.S. Navy enlisting in 1948 at the age of seventeen. During the closing weeks of 1950 while the 1st Marine Division was surrounded and fighting their way out of the Chinese Communist trap at the frozen Chosin Reservoir he and a fellow hospital corpsman Ollie Langston volunteered for the Fleet Marine Force to serve in a Marine rifle company. Hughes had missed World War II and wanted to find out what combat was like. Accordion War: Korea 1951-Life and Death in a Marine Rifle Company is the story of his experience. Today Hughes is professor emeritus of English at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. He graduated with a BA in political science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957 and for the next nine years worked in communication intelligence for the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and later the Air Force Security Service as a cryptanalyst (Russian), instructor of cryptanalysis, technical writer (cryptanalysis), technical editor, and finally as the Chief of the Editing and Publications Branch of the USAFSS School at Goodfellow AFB, San Angelo, Texas. He left that position in 1966 to attend graduate school at Texas Tech University at Lubbock where he received an MA (1968) and a PhD (1971) in literature and linguistics after which he was hired by Henderson State where he taught up to and after his retirement in 1996, serving for five of those years as Chairman of the English and Foreign Languages Department.