The Old Glory Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; and Benito Cereno

by Herman Melville

Since you've clearly connected with Melville's moral ambiguity in *Benito Cereno*, this earlier novella offers a different kind of nightmare—one set on a Mississippi riverboat where every passenger might be a con artist or victim, and the reader can never quite trust what's happening. Lowell's adaptation showed how powerfully Melville captures American hypocrisy; this work is Melville at his most deliberately disorienting about who deserves our sympathy.

by David Langston

Miller wrote this play in 1953 as a direct response to McCarthyism, much as Lowell adapted these stories in 1964 to speak to his own moment—both playwrights understood that historical drama is always about the present. The Salem witch trials become a stage for examining how communities turn on themselves, with the same kind of psychological intensity and moral reckoning you found in *My Kinsman, Major Molineux*.

by Anke Balduf

This 1952 novel does something Lowell's adaptations hint at but don't fully explore: it places an African American consciousness at the center of American mythmaking. The unnamed narrator's journey through various American institutions mirrors the power dynamics in *Benito Cereno*, but from a perspective that forces you to reconsider everything about visibility, identity, and who gets to tell America's story.

by Edward E. Ericson

Here's the surprise: this 1960s Russian novel shares Lowell's gift for layering multiple time periods and moral registers into a single narrative nightmare. A Soviet bureaucrat, a devil, and a writer in Stalin's Moscow create the same kind of hallucinatory, mythic quality you experienced in *The Old Glory*—but filtered through a completely different political system, which makes the parallels about power and corruption even more unsettling.

by Lance Callahan

Walcott's 1990 epic poem does what Lowell attempted: it rewrites classical and American narratives to center the voices and experiences that those narratives had erased. Set in the Caribbean (echoing *Benito Cereno*'s geography), it's written in a language that's simultaneously Homeric and deeply local, making it feel like a conversation between centuries about who gets to be heroic in America's story.