Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in Manhattan, the third of eight children of Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. Both parents came from prominent families: his paternal grandfather, Thomas Melvill, had taken part in the Boston Tea Party, and his maternal grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, was a Revolutionary War general celebrated for defending Fort Stanwix ^[1]. The family added the final letter to its surname after Allan's death.

Allan Melvill worked as an importer of French dry goods, and for a time the household lived comfortably in New York City. That security did not last. Mounting debts forced the family to move to Albany in 1830, and Allan died in 1832 after a physical and mental collapse, leaving his widow and children in straitened circumstances ^[2]. Herman was twelve.

The boy's schooling was repeatedly interrupted by the family's finances. He attended the Albany Academy and later studied briefly at the Albany Classical School and the Lansingburgh Academy, but he also had to work: as a bank clerk, on his uncle's farm, in his brother's fur and cap store, and as a schoolteacher in rural Massachusetts and New York ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Herman Melville before the novels finds a young man improvising a living in the wake of his father's ruin.

In June 1839 Melville shipped out of New York as a crew member on the merchant vessel St. Lawrence, bound for Liverpool. The voyage gave him his first taste of ordinary seamen's labor and of the poverty he witnessed in the Liverpool docks, material he later reworked in the novel Redburn ^[2].

The decisive journey began on January 3, 1841, when he sailed from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, aboard the whaler Acushnet, headed for the Pacific whaling grounds ^[3]. Eighteen months later, in July 1842, Melville and a shipmate deserted at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. He spent several weeks living among the Typee people of the island's interior, an interlude he would transform into his first book. He then left on an Australian whaler, the Lucy Ann, took part in a shipboard revolt, and was briefly detained in Tahiti before drifting on to Hawaii ^[3].

In August 1843 he enlisted as an ordinary seaman on the frigate United States and served fourteen months in the U.S. Navy, an experience that supplied the substance of White-Jacket, his exposure of naval discipline and flogging. He was discharged in Boston in October 1844 and never went to sea as a working sailor again ^[2]. Those five years furnished nearly everything he wrote.

Back on shore, Melville began telling stories of the Marquesas to family and friends, who urged him to write them down. The result was Typee (1846), a partly fictionalized account of his weeks among the islanders, published first in London and then in New York. The book sold well and made his name; some readers doubted that its adventures could be true until his fellow deserter, Richard Tobias Greene, surfaced to confirm the outline of the story ^[1].

A sequel, Omoo (1847), drew on his Tahitian wanderings and consolidated his standing as a popular chronicler of the South Seas. Flush with this success, he married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in August 1847 ^[2]. The couple settled in New York City, where Melville wrote at a furious pace.

His next books tested his audience. Mardi (1849) began as another island narrative and swerved into allegory and philosophical speculation; reviewers were unkind. He answered with two rapidly written and more conventional books, Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), which he privately dismissed as jobs done for money, though both contain some of his sharpest social observation ^[2].

In 1850 Melville bought Arrowhead, a farmhouse near Pittsfield in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, and moved his family there. That August he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived nearby in Lenox, and the friendship changed the book he was writing. Under Hawthorne's influence, a documentary narrative about whaling deepened into something far stranger and more ambitious ^[4].

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale appeared in London in October 1851 (as The Whale) and in New York the following month, with a dedication to Hawthorne. The novel follows the monomaniacal Captain Ahab's pursuit of a white sperm whale, narrated by the sailor Ishmael, and mixes adventure, cetology, drama, and metaphysics in a form no one had attempted before ^[1]. Contemporary reviews were divided, and sales were modest; the book earned Melville little money in his lifetime.

His next novel, Pierre (1852), a dark psychological story set on land, was savaged by critics, one New York paper announcing that its author had gone mad. The commercial failures piled up, and publishers grew wary ^[2]. During the mid 1850s he turned to magazine fiction, producing short works of lasting power, including Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and Benito Cereno (1855), along with the novel Israel Potter and the bitter, formally daring The Confidence-Man (1857), the last prose fiction he published in his lifetime ^[1].

Melville and Elizabeth Shaw Melville had four children: Malcolm, Stanwix, Elizabeth, and Frances. Family life was shadowed by financial strain, by Melville's dark moods, and by tragedy. Malcolm died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at home in 1867 at the age of eighteen, and Stanwix died in San Francisco in 1886 ^[2].

Money worries were constant. Loans from his father-in-law kept the household afloat through the Arrowhead years, and in 1863 the family sold the farm and returned to New York City, settling at 104 East 26th Street, where Melville lived for the rest of his life ^[4]. In 1856 and 1857, with Judge Shaw's help, he traveled through Europe and the Holy Land, visiting Hawthorne in Liverpool along the way; his journals from that trip later fed his long poem Clarel.

After his books stopped paying, Melville tried the lyceum circuit, lecturing between 1857 and 1860 on subjects including Roman statuary and the South Seas, with limited success ^[2]. His years as teacher, sailor, and lecturer all preceded the quiet clerkship that occupied his final working decades.

In December 1866 Melville secured a post as a district inspector of customs at the port of New York, a modest job he held for nineteen years, resigning at the end of 1885 after inheritances eased the family finances ^[2]. During those years he wrote chiefly poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) gathered his poems on the Civil War, and Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), running to some 18,000 lines, was printed with money left by his uncle Peter Gansevoort ^[1].

Two privately printed collections followed in tiny editions of about 25 copies each: John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891) ^[2]. In his last years he also returned to prose, working on the story of a handsome young sailor hanged for striking a superior officer. Billy Budd, Sailor was left in manuscript at his death and remained unknown until scholars prepared it for publication in 1924 ^[5].

Melville died of cardiac disease at his New York City home on September 28, 1891, at the age of 72. He had fallen so far from public view that the New York Times misrendered his most famous title in its brief notice of his death ^[6]. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx beside his son Malcolm.

The Melville revival began around the centennial of his birth in 1919, when critics such as Raymond Weaver, author of the first full biography in 1921, and English admirers including D. H. Lawrence reexamined the neglected novels ^[5]. The publication of Billy Budd in 1924 accelerated the reassessment, and by mid century Moby-Dick was widely taught as one of the summits of American fiction. Any list of Herman Melville achievements now begins with that novel, but Bartleby, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd hold canonical status of their own.

His afterlife extends well beyond the classroom. Moby-Dick has inspired films, operas, paintings, and countless adaptations; Bartleby's refrain of preferring not to has entered common speech; and writers from William Faulkner to Ralph Ellison and Cormac McCarthy have acknowledged his example ^[1]. The Melville Society, founded in 1945, supports ongoing scholarship, and Arrowhead in Pittsfield operates as a museum where visitors can see the study in which Moby-Dick was completed ^[4].

Among the more striking Herman Melville facts is the shape of the career itself: dazzling early fame, a masterpiece met with indifference, three decades of obscurity, and a posthumous elevation few American writers have matched. Readers who come to a Herman Melville biography looking for a steady ascent find instead a life that his own fiction seems to have foretold, stubborn, unlucky, and finally vindicated ^[2].