Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet whose experience at sea supplied the material for most of his fiction. [1] His early travel narratives Typee and Omoo brought popular success, but Moby-Dick (1851) was poorly received and he spent his last decades in obscurity as a New York customs officer. [2] A revival of interest in the 1920s established him as a major figure in world literature.
Early life
Herman Melville was born in Manhattan on 1 August 1819, the third of eight children of a merchant importer. The family's fortunes collapsed with his father's business failure and death in 1832, ending Melville's formal schooling in New York and Albany and forcing him into a series of jobs as clerk, farmhand and schoolteacher. [1]
In 1839 he shipped out as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool, and in January 1841 he sailed from New Bedford aboard the whaler Acushnet. [2] He deserted the following year in the Marquesas Islands, spent weeks among the Typee people, joined an Australian whaler, took part in a mutiny at Tahiti, and eventually returned home in 1844 after service in the United States Navy.
Early novels
Melville turned these voyages into Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), narratives of Polynesian life that sold well and made his name, though some readers doubted their accuracy and others objected to his criticism of missionaries. [1] He married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847 and settled in New York, publishing the allegorical Mardi, then the more conventional Redburn and White-Jacket in quick succession to earn money.
Moby-Dick and the later fiction
In 1850 the family moved to Arrowhead, a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where Melville became a neighbour and close friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The encounter reshaped the whaling book he was writing, which grew into Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, published in 1851 and dedicated to Hawthorne. [2] Combining adventure narrative with cetology, drama, sermon and philosophical digression, the novel sold modestly and puzzled reviewers.
Pierre (1852) was still worse received. Melville turned to magazine work, producing the stories Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, collected with others in The Piazza Tales, and published his last novel, The Confidence-Man, in 1857. [1] Thereafter he wrote almost entirely in verse.
Later years
From 1866 to 1885 Melville worked as a customs inspector on the New York docks, a steady but obscure post. He published Battle-Pieces, poems on the Civil War, and in 1876 Clarel, a long narrative poem on faith and doubt set in the Holy Land, printed with help from a relative. [3] Family life was marked by loss, including the death of his elder son.
He died in New York City on 28 September 1891, largely forgotten by the reading public. The manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor was left unfinished among his papers and was first published in 1924. [1]
Legacy
The centenary of Melville's birth and the appearance of Billy Budd prompted the so-called Melville Revival of the 1920s, in which critics reappraised Moby-Dick as a foundational American novel. [2] It has since generated an enormous body of scholarship and numerous adaptations, while Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno are staples of the short-story canon and his poetry has attracted growing attention. [3]
