Herman Melville

Herman Melville, born Herman Melvill on August 1, 1819, in New York City, was an American writer of the American Renaissance period. He was the third of eight children of Allan Melvill, a prosperous merchant, and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. His family background joined trade, religion, and Revolutionary War memory: one grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, took part in the Boston Tea Party, while his maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in 1777.

Melville’s childhood began in comfort, in a household with servants and frequent moves to larger homes, but that security did not last. His father lived beyond his means, and when family financial support ended, the Melvilles were left under heavy debt. Allan Melvill died in 1832, leaving the family in dire financial straits. Melville’s education had begun at age six, and he attended New York Male High School and Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, but the pressures around him soon pushed him toward work and the wider world.

In 1839, Melville went to sea as a common sailor on the merchant ship St. Lawrence. In 1841, he sailed on the whaler Acushnet, then jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Those years supplied the material for his first books. Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw.

Melville’s literary ambition grew quickly. Mardi (1849), a romance adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both drawn from his experience as a well-born young man at sea, received respectable reviews but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family. He spent nearly a year and a half writing Moby-Dick (1851), now among his best-known works, but it did not find an audience in his lifetime. Critics also scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852).

From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last prose work, The Confidence-Man. He moved to New York City in 1863 and eventually became a United States customs inspector. In his later years, he turned much of his creative energy to poetry, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), a poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War, and Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876).

Melville’s later life carried heavy sorrow. His eldest child, Malcolm, died at home in 1867 from a self-inflicted gunshot, and his son Stanwix died in 1886 of apparent tuberculosis. Melville retired that same year. He privately published two volumes of poetry, left another unpublished, and left the novella Billy Budd, Sailor unfinished when he died of cardiovascular disease on September 28, 1891. At his death he was not well known to the public, but a revival began in 1919, the centennial of his birth, and Moby-Dick would come to be considered one of the Great American Novels. His words still speak because they came from lived hardship, sea labor, moral inquiry, and a restless literary mind.