Biography: Herman Melville
When Herman Melville died in 1891, his death was noted in only one local newspaper,
which carried a brief description of the "long forgotten" author. Not until the early 20th century
was Melville's novel Moby Dick first recognized as a literary masterpiece and touted as a
cornerstone of modern American literature.
Born to a New York City merchant in 1819, Melville fought for a greatness that would not
be realized during his lifetime. Melville's father supported his seven children importing French
dry goods, but in 1830 he decided to try his luck in the fur business in Albany, NY. Within two
years, the family was bankrupt and Herman's father died suddenly. Melville and his siblings left
school to work in the family fur and cap business, with Melville working several other jobs as well
-- filling in teaching positions at local schools, working on his uncle's farm, and clerking in a local
bank.
Despite these difficulties, Herman Melville read extensively on his own, consuming
mythology, anthropology, and history. He was fascinated with Shakespeare's poetic devices and
their ability to capture an audience. He was also raised hearing the thrilling story of the whaleship
Essex, which was attacked by a whale and sunk when Melville was just a year old. Melville's
captivation with the terrifying grandeur of whales, the audacity of whalers, and the relationship
between the two would be a motivating factor behind his writing.
In 1839, at the age of 20, Melville took his first voyage across the Atlantic sea as a cabin boy on
the merchant ship the St. Lawrence. After this expedition and a year exploring the West, Melville
joined the crew of the whaling ship Acushnet in January of 1841. The thrilling adventure that
occurred during the next three years would satiate his desire for excitement and provide him with
his material for his first three novels.
After a year and a half aboard the Acushnet, Melville and a fellow seaman deserted the
ship, only to be captured by cannibals in the Marquesas Islands, the Typee. Although Melville was
treated well, he sought rescue on the Australia whale ship Lucy Ann when it arrive on the
Marquesas a month after his capture. On the Lucy Ann Melville traveled to Tahiti, where his
unusual journey continued when he, along with the crew, committed mutiny by refusing their
duty. Briefly jailed, Melville escaped and sailed to the nearby island Eimeo, where he worked on a
potato farm.
More than five months after deserting the Acushnet, Melville's adventures were not over.
Tiring of life on Eimeo, he joined the crew of whaler Charles and Henry, where he worked as
harpooner. When the Charles and Henry anchored in Maui Island five months later in April of
1843, Melville took up work as a clerk and bookkeeper in a general store in Honolulu. In August,
1843, Melville enlisted in the US Navy and embarked on the final leg of his journey, working as a
seaman on the Navy ship United States through the Pacific.
In October 1844, Melville returned to his mother's house determined to write about his
adventures. His subsequent writings borrowed from his own experiences as well as other peoples'
fantastic stories that he heard during his travels. Because of his extensive experience as a seaman
and a whaler, his descriptions of life out at sea were comprehensive and unflinchingly accurate.
Melville was also able to communicate the fear and terror of a whale hunt, a feat that would make
his greatest work, Moby Dick, a literary tribute to the whaling industry.
His first manuscript, a tale in which the narrator, Tommo, is captured by Typee
cannibals, was initially rejected in the United States because publishers refused to believe the
validity of the story. The story was finally accepted in London, where Melville's older brother,
Gansevoort, was working for the American Legation. Typee was published in Britain in February
of 1846 to favorable reviews. Lauded for its ethnographic focus exploring the relationship
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between a New Englander and a foreign culture, Melville's story gained even more popularity
after one of Herman's former crewmates came forward to validate its factual base. This new
based-on-a-true-story status coupled with Americans' high interest in maritime adventures,
helped Typee sell over 6,000 copies in two years when it was published in the U.S.
In the midst of his initial years as a profitable author, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw,
daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts and a close family friend. The chief justice, Lemuel
Shaw, would later support Melville in the late 1850s during his financial struggles. With his new
bride, Melville moved to New York City to live with his younger brother, mother, and four sisters
in late 1847. Despite these crowded quarters, Melville was able to continue writing, and he
finished two more novels within two years.
Encouraged by his success with Typee, Melville published Omoo in 1847, a story inspired
by his time in the Polynesian Islands of Tahini and Eimeo. Omoo was just as successful as Typee,
and Melville immediately began work on his third installment of his maritime adventures, Mardi
and a Voyage Thither. Published in 1849, Mardi was not as successful as his previous two books,
a fact credited largely to his increased use of allegory and a more farfetched storyline.
From 1849 to 1850, Melville wrote two more novels, Redburn and White-Jacket, both of which he
later claimed to write simply for the money and the prestige. These attempts to inflate his image
as an author won him general acclaim and the novels were modest hits. Melville moved on to his
most prolific endeavor yet -- a story about one man's need to conquer and kill a great white whale.
Melville had first thought of the idea after reading a 1839 article by Jeremiah N. Renolds entitled
"Mocha Dick: Or, the White Whale of the Pacific."
While he drafted what would become the novel Moby Dick, Melville met and befriended
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had recently published the literary masterpiece The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne provided Melville with precious feedback on his manuscript, and encouraged him to
change his current draft, a detailed account of whaling, into an allegorical novel.
In October 1851, The Whale, printed later as Moby Dick, was published in London. The allegorical
undertones that Melville cultivated throughout the novel picked up on the link between whaling
and a mid-19th century emerging American identity. The story centers around the narrator
Ishmael, a sailor on the whaleship Pequod. The ship captain, Ahab, has lost his leg to Moby Dick
on a previous expedition, and he is motivated to the point of derangement by revenge for the
whale's life. Powered by this plot, Melville's Moby Dick spun the parable of the hunt for the great
white whale as an emblem of the human condition and the reckless expansion of the American
republic.
Despite Melville's high expectations for Moby Dick, literary critics largely disregarded the
novel. Many critics were impressed with the detailed account of whaling voyages, but during
Melville's entire lifetime, the book sold only 3,000 copies. Interest in maritime adventures was
dwindling as Americans were setting their imaginations towards the potential in the West.
After the disappointment of Moby Dick's reception, Melville faced a battle against
obscurity and financial ruin for the remainder of his life. In 1852, he wrote Pierre, a psychological
romance based on his own childhood, but a negative critical reception and a poor sales
performance cost him a significant amount of his savings. He turned to short pieces and poetry,
publishing several pieces in Putnam's Monthly Magazine from 1853 to 1854. The general public
ignored his short novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), and Melville entered a
period of darkness and depression.
A trip to Europe to visit his friend Hawthorne in October 1856 did little to lighten his melancholy
over a lost dream of literary fame. He toured the country from 1857 to 1860, giving lectures on
various topics such as "Statues in Rome," "The South Seas," and the vague subject of "Traveling."
In 1863, Melville moved back to New York City where he later found a job as a customs inspector
on the New York docks.
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Throughout his following 20 years as a dock
worker, Melville continued writing, publishing the poem
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War in 1866. The
chronological piece included depictions of all types of
soldiers from both sides of the war, rendered accurately
from a trip to the war front to visit his cousin the year
before. Despite being considered among the best poems of
the 19th century, Battle-Pieces sold a meager 486 copies.
Further heartache befell Melville when his oldest
son, Malcolm, committed suicide in 1867. Again Melville
turned to travel to gain perspective and possible writing
material. His 1876 poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage
in the Holy Land drew upon his experiences in Europe and
the Holy Land and set a baseline for a theme of religious
crisis. Melville continued to pen poetry throughout these
later years, printing John Marr and Other Sailors
privately for friends and family in 1888. Melville was
working on the manuscript of Billy Budd, Foretopman, a
story about a sailor falsely accused of involvement in
mutiny, when he died of a heart attack on September
28, 1891.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
A page in Melville's journal about meeting
Capt. Pollard of the Essex
In the 1920s, literary scholars began to
identify Moby Dick as a work that commented upon larger issues of the American experience in
the 19th century. Critics increasingly recognized Moby Dick as one of the greatest pieces of
American literature, and they began to discuss the allegorical implications at long last. The novel
has been described as both an allegory to the push west (the prairie being the sea) and the Gold
Rush (the gold being the whale), and it has been taught in classrooms worldwide for its successful
combination of philosophical speculation, Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging while
moving an intelligent and authentic, albeit fantastic, plot.
Today, Moby Dick is a staple of many high school curriculum reading lists, and a 1956
film version by John Huston introduced the story into popular culture. In Moby Dick and his
other works, Melville was able to incorporate stories of adventure with examinations of many
inherently American themes: religion versus science, human limitations and emerging
technology, and truth versus American myth. The ramifications that Americans can take from
reading Melville center around the immoral manifestation of the democratic ideal that Americans
were facing during the height of the whaling industry and one that we still battle with today.
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