Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance whose works of prose and poetry, particularly Moby-Dick, are now central to the American literary canon. Born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, he died in relative obscurity on September 28, 1891, and was rediscovered in the 1920s.

Melville was the third of eight children of import merchant Allan Melvill, whose bankruptcy and death in 1832 left the family in financial difficulty. He attended the Albany Academy and Albany Classical School intermittently, and worked as a bank clerk, farmhand, and schoolteacher before going to sea.

He shipped out as a cabin boy on the merchant vessel St. Lawrence in 1839 and joined the whaler Acushnet in 1841, deserting in the Marquesas Islands and living briefly among the Typee people. These experiences fueled the loosely autobiographical novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which were popular successes.

He published Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850) before moving to a farm called Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, near Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in 1851. The book sold poorly, and the philosophical novel Pierre (1852) damaged his commercial standing further. He published the short stories "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) and "Benito Cereno" (1855) in Putnam's Magazine, and from 1866 worked nearly two decades as a customs inspector in New York City. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death and first published in 1924.

The name Herman is of Germanic origin, from the elements heri meaning "army" and man meaning "man," giving a sense of "soldier" or "warrior."