Herman Melville: Bio

Herman Melville

1819-1891

Herman Melville, (1819-1891), American novelist, a major literary figure whose exploration of psychological and metaphysical themes foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns. His works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized.

Melville was born in New York City, into a family whose fortunes had declined. In 1839 he shipped to Liverpool, England, as a cabin boy. When he returned to the United States he taught school and then sailed for the South Seas in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18-month voyage Melville deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for a month among the natives, who were cannibals (see Cannibalism). He escaped aboard an Australian trader, leaving it at Papeete, Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field laborer and then shipped to Honolulu, Hawaii, where in 1843 he enlisted as a seaman on the U.S. Navy frigate United States. After his discharge in 1844 Melville began to write novels based on his experiences and to take part in the literary life of Boston, Massachusetts, and of New York City.

Melville's first five novels all achieved quick popularity. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847) were romances of the South Sea islands. Mardi (1849) was a complex allegorical fantasy. Redburn, His First Voyage (1849), based on Melville's first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (1850), a fictionalization of his experiences in the navy, exposed the abuse of sailors that was prevalent in the U.S. Navy at that time. In 1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or The Whale (1851).

The central theme of this novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab's legs at the knee. Ahab is dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, the narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections include the rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy "flats", passages conveying nonnarrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages, such as the tale of the Tally-Ho. These sections can stand by themselves as short stories of merit. The work is invested with Ishmael's sense of profound wonder at his story, but it nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahab's quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew except Ishmael.

Moby-Dick was not a financial success, and Melville's next novel, Pierre: or the Ambiguities (1852), a darkly allegorical exploration of the nature of evil, was a critical and financial failure. Today, however, it enjoys some acceptance by critics and the public. Israel Potter (1855), a historical romance, was equally unsuccessful.

The Piazza Tales (1856) contains some of Melville's finest shorter works; particularly notable are the powerful short stories "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby the Scrivener" and the ten descriptive sketches of the Galepagos Islands, Ecuador, titled "The Encantadas." The unfinished novel The Confidence-Man (1857), set on a steamboat on the Mississippi River, satirizes the selfishness and commercialism of Melville's time. Between 1866 and 1885 Melville worked as a customs inspector in New York City in order to support himself. During this period he published poetry that has since gained increasing respect, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), and the book-length Clarel (1876), about a troubled pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In 1891 he completed his last work, the novella Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924). It is the story of a young sailor, personifying innocence, who is doomed by the malevolent hatred of a ship's officer, personifying evil. The work was adapted as an opera in 1951 by the English composer Benjamin Britten in collaboration with the English novelist E. M. Forster, and both as a play and as a film in 1962.

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