Herman Melville

Life

Herman Melville was born in New York City in August 1819 into a merchant family with distinguished Revolutionary War ancestors on both sides. His father’s import business failed and he died in 1832, leaving the family in financial trouble, and Melville’s formal schooling ended early. He worked as a clerk, a farmhand, and a schoolteacher before going to sea, first on a merchant ship to Liverpool in 1839 and then, in 1841, on the whaler Acushnet out of New Bedford.

He deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in 1842, lived for several weeks among the islanders, and made his way home by way of Tahiti and Hawaii, finally serving on a United States Navy frigate. These experiences supplied his first books. Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) were popular successes as South Seas adventures, and he followed them with several more novels of the sea. Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was received with puzzlement and sold poorly, and Pierre (1852) did worse. His career as a novelist effectively ended with The Confidence-Man in 1857.

Melville turned to poetry, published a collection about the Civil War in 1866, and in that year took a job as a customs inspector in New York, which he held for nineteen years. He died in New York in September 1891, largely forgotten as a writer. The short novel Billy Budd, found among his papers, was not published until 1924.

Literary significance

Melville’s reputation was remade in the 1920s, when critics rediscovered Moby-Dick and began to treat it as a central work of American literature. His fiction combines sea adventure with philosophical inquiry and formal experiment, and his willingness to mix genres within a single book, which baffled his contemporaries, is what later readers have valued most. The short stories “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno” and the novella Billy Budd are also widely read and taught.

Where to start

Moby-Dick is the book to read, but it is long and digressive. Readers who want to try Melville on a smaller scale can begin with his short fiction before committing to the whale.