Green Shadows, White Whale
Green Shadows, White Whale is a 1992 novel by Ray Bradbury. It gives a fictionalized account of his journey to Ireland in 1953-1954 to write a screen adaptation of the novel Moby-Dick with director John Huston. Bradbury has said he wrote it after reading actress Katharine Hepburn's account of filming The African Queen with Huston in Africa. The title itself is a play on Peter Viertel's novel White Hunter, Black Heart, which is also about Huston. Bradbury considers Green Shadows to be the culmination of thirty-five years of short stories, poems, and plays that were inspired by his stay in Ireland. As with most of his previous short-story collections, including The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles, many of the short stories were originally published elsewhere and modified slightly for publication in the novel. Plot The narrator, an unnamed writer, is sent to Dublin, Ireland to coproduce a film adaptation of Moby Dick with a director whose first name is given as "John". The narrator checks in at the Royal Hibernian Hotel in Dublin before leaving for Heeber Finn's Pub in Kilcock, where he converses with several local characters. The narrator meets with his director, John, and John's wife, Ricki.