Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 into a once-prosperous merchant family that collapsed financially when he was twelve; his father died a year later, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. The reversal cut short Melville's formal schooling and pushed him through a series of jobs — bank clerk, farmhand, schoolteacher — before he went to sea at nineteen as a cabin boy on a packet to Liverpool. In 1841 he shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet out of New Bedford, an experience that would supply the raw material for nearly everything he wrote afterward.

The whaling voyage did not go well by any conventional measure. Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, lived for several weeks among the Typee people, was picked up by an Australian whaler, was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti for participating in a mutinous protest, and eventually worked his way home aboard the US Navy frigate United States in 1844. He turned these adventures into Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which were popular successes that established him as a writer of South Seas travel romances. He married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, settled in New York, then in 1850 moved to a farm called Arrowhead near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived a few miles away.

The friendship with Hawthorne, intense on Melville's side and more guarded on Hawthorne's, was the catalyst for the book that became Moby-Dick (1851). Melville dedicated it to Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius." The novel — an obsessed New England captain, his hunt for the white whale that took his leg, the multinational crew of the Pequod, the cetological digressions, the prose veering between Shakespearean monologue and biblical thunder — was unlike anything in American letters and almost no one knew what to make of it. Reviews were mixed to baffled; sales were disastrous. The book sold fewer than four thousand copies in Melville's lifetime.

Pierre (1852) was worse received, attacked as morally perverse. The Confidence-Man (1857), now regarded as a remarkable proto-modernist novel about American fraud, was treated as the work of a writer who had lost his audience and possibly his mind. Melville stopped publishing fiction. In 1866 he took a job as a customs inspector on the New York docks, a position he held for nineteen years, writing poetry in obscurity in his off-hours — Battle-Pieces (1866) about the Civil War, and the enormous Clarel (1876).

He died in 1891 with most of his work out of print. The obituaries that bothered to notice him at all called him a forgotten author of South Seas romances. A manuscript was found among his papers — Billy Budd, Sailor, the short novel of a beautiful sailor hanged for striking a master-at-arms, written in his final years and left unfinished. It sat unread until 1924, when its publication helped trigger the Melville Revival that reestablished Moby-Dick as the central novel in the American canon. By then Melville had been dead for thirty-three years.