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This is a story of two modern wanderers, convinced of their aloneness but still looking for connection. Lewis Mumford, born in New York a few years after Herman Melville died there, had the chance to look backward and find a kindred spirit: as of the mid-1920s, only one biography of Melville had been published, and Mumford decided to write the second, helping to bolster the so-called Melville Revival.1 That kind of rediscovery can be a saving grace. But it takes work. Modernity, after all, has been full of discontinuity and disorientation. The pace of change—the slippage of time—leaves people unmoored in space. Neighborhoods are razed—neighbors move away—the world is remade. In modern cities, there is the exhilaration of possibility, of fluid identity, of new experiences—the buzz of constant encounter. There is also the reality of crowding, pollution, poverty, injustice, mechanization, alienation. “To be modern,” as the philosopher Marshall Berman put it, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” To be modern is sometimes to feel in touch, tapped in, attuned; it is also to feel lonely, inward, nervous, overwhelmed. Modernity has delivered movies, rockets, computers, cell phones, and vaccines, which politicians and business leaders tout as clear evidence of Progress— in part to distract people from other modern realities, like nuclear bombs, toxic chemicals, factory farms, sweatshops, and global warming.