Biography herman melville

American writer and poet (–)

Herman Melville (bornMelvill;^[a] August 1, &#;– September 28, ) was an American novelist, short story author, and poet of the American Renaissance period.

Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (); Typee (), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the second of his death Melville was not well known to the public, but , the centennial of his birth, was the starting point of a Melville revival.^[1]Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.

Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands.

Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their victory gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw.

Mardi (), a romance-adventure and his first publication not based on his control experience, was not well received. Redburn () and White-Jacket (), both tales based on his experience as a well-born little man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to back his expanding family.

Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (). From to , Melville published brief fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener".

In , he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last operate of prose, The Confidence-Man (). He moved to New York in , eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.

From that indicate, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry.

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War () was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In , his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in In , his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired.

During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at the time of his death, but was published posthumously in Melville died from cardiovascular disease in

Early experience and education

Melville was born in New York City, on August 1, , the third of eight children to Allan Melvill^[3] and Maria (Gansevoort) Melvill.

His seven siblings, who played significant roles in his career and emotional life, were Gansevoort, Helen Maria, Augusta, Allan, Catherine, Frances Priscilla, and Thomas, who eventually became a governor of Sailors' Snug Harbor. Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Allan Melvill spent considerable moment away from New York Capital, travelling regularly to Europe as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods.

Both of Melville's grandfathers played significant roles in the American Revolutionary War, and Melville later expressed satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent".

Major Thomas Melvill participated in the Boston Tea Party, and Melville's maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in Modern York in

At the change of the 19th century, Major Melvill did not send his son Allan (Herman's father) to college, but instead sent him to France, where he spent two years in Paris and learned to speak French fluently.

In , Allan, who subscribed to his father's Unitarianism, married Maria Gansevoort, who was dedicated to her family's more strict and biblically oriented Dutch Reformed version of the Calvinist creed.

Herman Melville (August 1, – September 28, ) was an American writer. A consummate adventurer, Melville wrote about ocean voyages with rigorous detail. His most famous work, Moby-Dick, was unappreciated during his lifetime, but has since come to the fore as one of America’s greatest novels.

The Gansevoorts' severe Protestantism ensured that Maria was adv versed in the Bible, in English as well as in Dutch,^[b] the language that the Gansevoorts spoke at home.

On August 19, almost three weeks after his birth, Melville was baptized at home by a minister of the South Reformed Dutch Church.

During the s, Melville lived a privileged and opulent life in a household supported by three or more servants at a time. Every four years, the family moved to more spacious and elegant quarters, finally settling on Broadway in Allan Melvill lived beyond his means, on large sums that he borrowed from his father and from his wife's widowed mother.

Although his wife's belief of his financial conduct is unknown, biographer Hershel Parker says that Maria "thought her mother's money was infinite and that she was entitled to much of her portion" while her children were young.

How good the parents managed to obscure the truth from their children is "impossible to know", according to biographer Andrew Delbanco.

In , the Gansevoorts ended their financial support of the Melvilles, at which point Allan's lack of financial responsibility had left him in debt to both the Melvill and Gansevoort families for a sum exceeding $20, (equivalent to $, in ).

But Melville biographer Newton Arvin writes that the relative happiness and comfort of Melville's early childhood depended less on Allan's wealth and profligate spending than on the "exceptionally tender and affectionate essence in all the family relationships, especially in the immediate circle".

Arvin describes Allan as "a man of real sensibility and a particularly warm and loving father," while Maria was "warmly maternal, simple, robust, and affectionately devoted to her husband and her brood".^[16]

Melville's education began when he was six.

In , the Melvills moved to a newly built house at 33 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. In , Herman and his brother Gansevoort enrolled in New York Male High School. In , the year that Herman contracted scarlet fever, Allan Melvill described him as "very backwards in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension" at first,^[20] but his development increased its pace and Allan was surprised "that Herman proved the best Speaker in the introductory Department".

In , both Gansevoort and Herman transferred to Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, and Herman enrolled in the English Department on September "Herman I think is making more progress than formerly," Allan wrote in May to Major Melvill, "and without being a bright Scholar, he maintains a respectable standing, and would proceed further, if he could only be induced to study more—being a most amiable and angelic child, I cannot find it in my heart to coerce him".^[22]

Emotionally unstable and behind on paying the rent for the house on Broadway, Herman's father tried to recover by moving his family to Albany, Novel York, in and going into the fur business.

Herman attended The Albany Academy from October to October , where he took the standard preparatory course, including reading and spelling, penmanship, arithmetic, English grammar, geography, innate history, universal, Greek, Roman, and English history, classical biography, and Jewish antiquities.

In early August , Herman marched in the Albany city government procession of the year's "finest scholars" and was presented with a replicate of The London Carcanet, a collection of poems and prose, inscribed to him as "first best in ciphering books".

As Melville scholar Merton Sealts observed,

The ubiquitous classical references in Melville's published writings suggest that his study of ancient history, biography, and literature during his school days left a unforgettable impression on both his reflection and his art, as did his almost encyclopedic knowledge of both the Old and the New Testaments.

In October , Melville left the Academy.

While the precise reason is not recognizable definitively, Parker speculates it was for financial reasons, since "even the tiny tuition fee seemed too much to pay".

In December , Allan Melvill returned from New York City by steamboat, but he had to move the last 70 miles in an open carriage for two days and two nights in subfreezing temperatures.

In early January, he began to show "signs of delirium", and he grew worse until his wife felt that his suffering deprived him of his intellect.^[30] On January 28, , he died, two months prior to reaching his 50th birthday. Since Herman was no longer attending school, he likely witnessed his father's medical and mental deterioration.

Twenty years later, Melville described a similar death in Pierre.

Work as a clerk

The death of Allan caused many major shifts in the family's material and spiritual circumstances. One result was the greater influence of his mother's religious beliefs.

Maria sought consolation in her faith and in April was admitted as a member of the First Reformed Dutch Church. Herman's saturation in orthodox Calvinism was surely the most decisive intellectual and spiritual affect of his early life.

Two months after his father's death, Gansevoort entered the cap and fur business. Uncle Peter Gansevoort, a director of the Modern York State Bank, got Herman a job as clerk for $ a year (equivalent to $4, in ). Biographers cite a passage from Redburn when trying to answer what Herman must have felt then: "I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time," the narrator remarks, adding, "I must not think of those delightful days, before my father became a bankrupt&#; and we removed from the city; for when I think of those days, something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me".

With Melville, Arvin argues, one has to reckon with "psychology, the tormented psychology, of the decayed patrician".

When Melville's paternal grandfather died on September 16, , Maria and her children discovered Allan, somewhat unscrupulously, had borrowed more than his share of his inheritance, meaning Maria received only $20 (equivalent to $ in ).

His paternal grandmother died almost exactly seven months later. Melville did his job skillfully at the bank; although he was only 14 in , the bank considered him competent enough to be sent to Schenectady, New York, on an errand.

Not much else is known from this period except that he was very fond of drawing. The visual arts became a lifelong interest. Around May , the Melvilles moved to another house in Albany, a three-story brick house. That same month a fire destroyed Gansevoort's skin-preparing factory, which left him with personnel he could neither employ nor afford.

Instead he pulled Melville out of the bank to man the cap and fur store.

Intermittent function and studies

In , while still working in the store, Melville enrolled in Albany Classical College, perhaps using Maria's part of the proceeds from the sale of the estate of his maternal grandmother in March In September of the following year, Herman was back at The Albany Academy, participating in the school's Latin course.

He also participated in debating societies, in an apparent effort to craft up as much as he could for his missed years of schooling. During this age, he read Shakespeare, including Macbeth, whose witch scenes gave him the chance to teasingly scare his sisters.

By March , however, he again withdrew from The Albany Academy.

Gansevoort served as a role model and support for Melville throughout his life, particularly during this day trying to cobble together an education. In early , Gansevoort became a member of Albany's Young Men's Association for Joint Improvement, and in January Melville joined him there.

Gansevoort also had copies of John Todd's Index Rerum, a blank register for indexing remarkable passages from books one had read for easy retrieval. Among the sample entries that Gansevoort made exhibiting his academic scrupulousness was "Pequot, beautiful description of the war with," with a short title reference to the place in Benjamin Trumbull's A Complete History of Connecticut (Volume I in , and Volume II in ) in which the description could be found.

The two surviving volumes of Gansevoort's are the best evidence for Melville's reading in this period. Gansevoort's entries include books Melville used for Moby-Dick and Clarel, including "Parsees—of India—an excellent description of their character, and religion and an account of their descent—East India Sketch Book p.

21". Other entries are on Panther, the pirate's cabin, and storm at sea from James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover.

Work as a school teacher

The Panic of forced Gansevoort to file for bankruptcy in April. In June, Maria told the younger children they needed to leave Albany for somewhere cheaper.

Gansevoort began studying law in New York City while Herman managed the farm before getting a education position at Sikes District University near Lenox, Massachusetts. He taught about 30 students of various ages, including some his have age.

The semester over, he returned to his mother in In February he was elected president of the Philo Logos Population, which Peter Gansevoort invited to move into Stanwix Hall for no rent.

In the Albany Microscope in March, Melville published two polemical letters about issues in vogue in the debating societies. Historians Leon Howard and Hershel Parker suggest the motive behind the letters was a youthful desire to have his rhetorical skills publicly recognized.^[46] In May, the Melvilles moved to a rented house in Lansingburgh, almost 12 miles north of Albany.

Nothing is known about what Melville did or where he went for several months after he finished teaching at Sikes. On November 12, five days after arriving in Lansingburgh, Melville paid for a designation at Lansingburgh Academy to analyze surveying and engineering.

In an April letter recommending Herman for a job in the Engineer Department of the Erie Canal, Peter Gansevoort says his nephew "possesses the ambition to create himself useful in a business which he desires to create his profession," but no occupation resulted.

Just weeks after this defeat, Melville's first known published essay appeared.

Using the initials "L.A.V.", Herman contributed "Fragments from a Writing Desk" to the weekly newspaper Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, which printed it in two installments, the first on May 4. According to Merton Sealts, his use of heavy-handed allusions reveals familiarity with the work of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Walter Scott, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore.

Parker calls the piece "characteristic Melvillean mood-stuff" and considers its style "excessive enough [] to indulge his extravagances and just enough overdone to authorize him to deny that he was taking his style seriously".

For Delbanco, the style is "overheated in the manner of Poe, with sexually charged echoes of Byron and The Arabian Nights".

– Years at sea

On May 31, , Gansevoort, then living in New York City, wrote that he was sure Herman could get a job on a whaler or merchant vessel.

The next day, he signed aboard the merchant ship St. Lawrence as a "boy" (a green hand), which cruised from New York to Liverpool.Redburn: His First Voyage () draws on his experiences in this journey; at least two of the nine guide-books listed in chapter 30 of the book had been part of Allan Melvill's library.

He arrived back in New York October 1, and resumed teaching, now at Greenbush, New York, but left after one term because he had not been paid. In the summer of he and his friend James Murdock Fly went to Galena, Illinois, to view if his Uncle Thomas could help them find work.

Unsuccessful, he and his friend returned home in autumn, likely by way of St. Louis and up the Ohio River.

Inspired by contemporaneous popular cultural reading, including Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s recent book Two Years Before the Mast and Jeremiah N.

Reynolds's account in the May issue of The Knickerbocker magazine of the hunt for a excellent white sperm whale named Mocha Dick, Herman and Gansevoort traveled to New Bedford, where Herman signed up for a whaling voyage aboard a new ship, the Acushnet.

Built in , the ship measured some feet in length, almost 28 feet (&#;m) in breadth, and almost 14 feet in depth. She measured slightly less than tons and had two decks and three masts, but no quarter galleries. The Acushnet was owned by Melvin O.

Bradford and Philemon Fuller of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and was berthed near their office at the foot of Center Street in that town. Herman signed a contract on Christmas Day with the ship's agent as a "green hand" for 1/th of whatever profits the voyage would yield.

On Sunday the 27th, the brothers heard Reverend Enoch Mudge preach at the Seamen's Bethel on Johnnycake Hill, where white marble cenotaphs on the walls memorialized local sailors who had died at sea, often in battle with whales.

When he signed the crew list the next day, Herman was advanced $

On January 3, , the Acushnet set sail.^[c] Melville slept with some twenty others in the forecastle; Captain Valentine Pease, the mates, and the skilled men slept aft.

Whales were create near The Bahamas, and in March barrels of oil were sent home from Rio de Janeiro. Cutting in and trying-out (boiling) a single whale took about three days, and a whale yielded approximately one barrel of oil per foot of length and per ton of weight (the average whale weighed 40 to 60 tons).

Herman Melville born Melvill ; [ a ] August 1, — September 28, was an American novelistshort story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick ; Typeea romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia ; and Billy Budd, Sailora posthumously published novella. At the time of his death Melville was not well known to the public, butthe centennial of his birth, was the starting point of a Melville revival. Melville was born in Fresh York City, the third youth of a prosperous merchant whose death in left the family in dire financial straits.

The oil was kept on deck for a day to stylish off, and was then stowed down; scrubbing the deck completed the labor. An average voyage meant that some forty whales were killed to yield some barrels of oil.

On April 15, the Acushnet sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific, where the crew sighted whales without catching any.

She then went up the coast of Chile to the region of Selkirk Island, and on May 7, near Juan Fernández Islands, she had barrels. On June 23, the ship anchored for the first moment since Rio, in Santa Harbor. The cruising grounds the Acushnet was sailing attracted much traffic, and Captain Pease not only paused to visit other whalers, but at times hunted in company with them.

From July 23 into August, the Acushnet regularly gammed with the Lima from Nantucket, and Melville met William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who gave him a copy of his father's account of his adventures aboard the Essex.

Ten years later, Melville wrote in his other copy of the book: "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me".^[64]

On September 25, the ship reported having barrels of oil to another whaler, and in October barrels.^[d] On October 24, the Acushnet crossed the equator to the north, and six or seven days later arrived at the Galápagos Islands.

This fleeting visit would be the basis for "The Encantadas". On November 2, the Acushnet and three other American whalers were searching for together near the Galápagos Islands; Melville later exaggerated that number in Sketch Fourth of "The Encantadas".

From November 19 to 25, the ship anchored at Chatham's Isle, and on December 2 reached the coast of Peru and anchored at Tombez near Paita, with barrels of oil on board. On December 27, the Acushnet sighted Cape Blanco, off Ecuador.

Point St. Elena was sighted the next day, and on January 6, , the ship approached the Galápagos Islands from the southeast. From February 13 to May 7,^{[clarification needed]} seven sightings of sperm whales were recorded, but none were killed.

From ahead May to early June, the Acushnet cooperatively set about its whaling endeavors several times with the Columbus of New Bedford, which also took letters from Melville's ship; the two ships were in the same area just south of the Equator.

On June 16, the Acushnet carried barrels of oil and sent home on the Herald the Second, and, on June 23, she reached the Marquesas Islands and anchored at Nuku Hiva.

In the summer of , Melville and his shipmate Richard Tobias Greene ("Toby") jumped ship at Nuku Hiva Bay.

Melville's first book, Typee (), is based on his stay in or near the Taipi Valley. By around mid-August, Melville had left the island aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, bound for Tahiti, where he took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in the native Calabooza Beretanee.

In October, he and crew mate John B. Troy escaped Tahiti for Eimeo. He then spent a month as beachcomber and island rover ("omoo" in Tahitian), eventually crossing over to Moorea. He drew on these experiences for Omoo, the sequel to Typee.

In November, he contracted to be a seaman on the Nantucket whaler Charles & Henry for a six-month cruise (November – April ), and was discharged at Lahaina, Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands, in May

After four months of active several jobs in Hawaii, including as a clerk, Melville linked the U.S.

Navy on August 20, as an ordinary seaman on the frigateUSS&#;United States. During the next year, the homeward bound ship visited the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Valparaiso, and then, from summer to decline , Mazatlan, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro, before reaching Boston on October 3.

Melville was discharged on October This Navy experience is used in White-Jacket (), Melville's fifth book.

Melville's wander-years created what biographer Arvin calls "a settled hatred of external authority, a lust for personal freedom", and a "growing and intensifying sense of his retain exceptionalism as a person", along with "the resentful sense that circumstance and mankind together had already imposed their will upon him in a series of injurious ways".^[74] Scholar Robert Milder believes the encounter with the wide ocean, where he was seemingly abandoned by God, led Melville to experience a "metaphysical estrangement" and influenced his social views in two ways: first, that he belonged to the genteel classes, but sympathized with the "disinherited commons" he had been placed among and, second, that experiencing the cultures of Polynesia let him view the West from an outsider's perspective.

– Successful writer

Upon his return, Melville regaled his family and friends with his adventurous tales and romantic experiences, and they urged him to put them into writing.

Melville completed Typee, his first book, in the summer of while living in Troy, New York. His brother Gansevoort found a publisher for it in London, where it was published in February by John Murray in his travel adventure series.

It became an overnight bestseller in England, then in New York, when it was published on March 17 by Wiley & Putnam.

In the narrative, Melville likely extended the period of time he had spent on the island and also incorporated material from source books he had assembled.

Celebrated American author Herman Melville wrote 'Moby-Dick' and several other sea-adventure novels before turning to poetry later in his literary career.

Milder calls Typee "an appealing mixture of adventure, anecdote, ethnography, and social criticism presented with a genial latitudinarianism that gave novelty to a South Sea idyll at once erotically suggestive and romantically chaste".

An unsigned review in the Salem Advertiser written by Nathaniel Hawthorne called the book a "skilfully managed" narrative by an author with "that freedom of view&#; which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be brief in accordance with our own".

Hawthorne continued:

This book is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life, in that unadulterated state of which there are now so few specimens remaining.

The gentleness of disposition that seems akin to the delicious climate, is shown in contrast with the traits of savage fiercenessHe has that freedom of view—it would be too rough to call it laxity of principle—which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own, a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor, and which makes his book the more wholesome to our staid landsmen.^[77]

Pleased but not overwhelmed by the adulation of his new public, Melville later expressed concern that he would "go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'!"^[78] The writing of Typee brought Melville assist into contact with his companion Greene—Toby in the book—who wrote confirming Melville's account in newspapers.

The two corresponded until , and in his final years Melville "traced and successfully located his old friend" for a further meeting of the two. In March , Omoo, a sequel to Typee, was published by Murray in London, and in May by Harper in New York.Omoo is "a slighter but more professional book," according to Milder.Typee and Omoo gave Melville overnight renown as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers.

As the writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper".

In , Melville tried unsuccessfully to find a "government job" in Washington.

In June , Melville and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Knapp Shaw were engaged, after knowing each other for approximately three months.

Melville had first asked her father, Lemuel Shaw, for her hand in March, but was at first turned down at the time.^[82] Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had been a close friend of Melville's father, and Shaw's marriage with Melville's aunt Nancy was prevented only by her death.

His warmth and financial support for the family continued after Allan's death. Melville dedicated his first manual, Typee, to him. Lizzie was raised by her grandmother and an Irish nurse. Arvin suggests that Melville's interest in Lizzie may have been stimulated by "his need of Judge Shaw's paternal presence".

Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. After his merchant father, Allan, died, leaving the family in penury, Melville attempted to support his family by working various jobs, from banking to teaching school. It was his adventures as a seaman in that inspired Melville to write. On one voyage, he was captured and held for several months.

They were married on August 4, Lizzie described their marriage as "very unexpected, and scarcely thought of until about two months before it actually took place".^[85] She wanted to be married in church, but they had a secret wedding ceremony at home to avoid possible crowds hoping to see the celebrity.^[86] The couple honeymooned in the then-British Province of Canada, and traveled to Montreal.

They settled in a house on Fourth Avenue in New York City (now called Park Avenue).

According to scholars Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Frederick James Kennedy, Lizzie brought to their marriage a sense of religious obligation, an intent to make a home with Melville regardless of place, a willingness to please her husband by performing such "tasks of drudgery" as mending stockings, an ability to hide her agitation, and a desire "to shield Melville from unpleasantness".

The Kennedys conclude that "If the ensuing years did bring regrets to Melville's life, it is impossible to believe he would have regretted marrying Elizabeth. In fact, he must have realized that he could not have borne the weight of those years unaided—that without her loyalty, intelligence, and affection, his own wild imagination would have had no "port or haven".

Biographer Robertson-Lorant cites "Lizzie's adventurous spirit and abundant energy," and she suggests that "her pluck and good humor might have been what attracted Melville to her, and vice versa".

An example of such nice humor appears in a letter about her not yet used to being married: "It seems sometimes exactly as if I were here for a visit. The illusion is quite dispelled however when Herman stalks into my room without even the ceremony of knocking, bringing me perhaps a button to sew on, or some equally affectionate occupation".^[90] On February 16, , the Melvilles' first child, Malcolm, was born.

In March , Mardi was published by Richard Bentley in London, and in April by Harper in New York.

Herman Melville. Redburn: His Voyage. Horsford Princeton: Princeton University Insist, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

Nathaniel Hawthorne thought it a rich book "with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life".^[92] According to Milder, the book began as another South Sea story but, as he wrote, Melville left that genre behind, first in favor of "a romance of the narrator Taji and the lost maiden Yillah," and then "to an allegorical voyage of the philosopher Babbalanja and his companions through the imaginary archipelago of Mardi".

In October , Redburn was published by Bentley in London, and in November by Harper in New York.

The bankruptcy and death of Allan Melvill, and Melville's own youthful humiliations surface in this "story of outward adaptation and inner impairment". Biographer Robertson-Lorant regards the work as a deliberate attempt for trendy appeal: "Melville modeled each episode almost systematically on every genre that was popular with some group of antebellum readers," combining elements of "the picaresque novel, the travelogue, the nautical adventure, the sentimental novel, the sensational French romance, the gothic thriller, temperance tracts, urban reform literature, and the English pastoral".

His next novel, White-Jacket, was published by Bentley in London in January , and in Protest by Harper in New York.

– Hawthorne and Moby-Dick

The earliest surviving mention of Moby-Dick is from a May 1, , letter in which Melville told fellow sea author Richard Henry Dana Jr.

"I am half way in the work."^[95] In June, he described the book to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall.^[96] The first manuscript has not survived.

That summer, Melville read Thomas Carlyle, borrowing copies of Sartor Resartus (–34) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History () from the library of his friend Evert Duyckinck.^[97] These readings proved significant, occurring as Melville radically transformed his initial plan for the novel over the next several months, conceiving what Delbanco described in as "the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer".

From August 4 to 12, , the Melvilles, Sarah Morewood, Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other literary figures from New York City and Boston came to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to enjoy a period of parties, picnics, and dinners.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his publisher James T. Fields linked the group while Hawthorne's wife stayed at home to peer after the children. On one picnic outing organized by Duyckinck, Hawthorne and Melville sought shelter from the rain together and had a deep, private conversation.

Melville had been given a copy of Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Former Manse, though he had not yet read it. Melville then avidly read it and wrote a review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in two installments, on August 17 and 24, in The Literary World.

Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black". He repeatedly compared Hawthorne to Shakespeare, and urged that "men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio." The critic Walter Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual planet while writing Moby-Dick" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".^[] Later that summer, Duyckinck sent Hawthorne copies of Melville's three most recent books.

Hawthorne read them, as he wrote to Duyckinck on August 29 that Melville in Redburn and White-Jacket put the reality "more unflinchingly" before his reader than any writer, and he idea Mardi was "a rich manual, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life".

But he cautioned, "It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better".^[]

In September , Melville borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw to buy a acre farm in Pittsfield.

Melville called his new home Arrowhead because of the arrowheads that were dug up around the property during planting season. That winter, Melville paid Hawthorne an unexpected check in, only to discover he was working and "not in the mood for company".

Hawthorne's wife Sophia gave him copies of Twice-Told Tales and, for Malcolm, The Grandfather's Chair. Melville invited them to visit Arrowhead soon, hoping to "[discuss] the World with a bottle of brandy & cigars" with Hawthorne, but Hawthorne would not stop operational on his new book for more than one day and they did not come.^[] After a second visit from Melville, Hawthorne surprised him by arriving at Arrowhead with his daughter Una.

According to Robertson-Lorant, "The handsome Hawthorne made quite an impression on the Melville women, especially Augusta, who was a great fan of his books". They spent the day mostly "smoking and talking metaphysics".

Robertson-Lorant writes that Melville was "infatuated with Hawthorne's intellect, captivated by his artistry, and charmed by his elusive personality," but "the friendship meant something different to each of them," with Hawthorne offering Melville "the kind of intellectual stimulation he needed".

They may have been "natural allies and friends," yet they were also "fifteen years apart in age and temperamentally quite different" and Hawthorne "found Melville's manic intensity exhausting at times". Bezanson identifies "sexual excitement" in all the ten letters Melville wrote to the older man.

In the essay on Hawthorne's Mosses, Melville wrote: "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his formidable New-England roots into the heated soil of my Southern soul." Melville dedicated his book to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne".

On October 18, , The Whale was published in Britain in three volumes, and on November 14 Moby-Dick appeared in the United States as a single volume. In between these dates, on October 22, , the Melvilles' second minor, Stanwix, was born.

In December, Hawthorne told Duyckinck, "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones."^[] Unlike other contemporaneous reviewers of Melville, Hawthorne had seen the uniqueness of Melville's new novel and acknowledged it.

In early December , Melville visited the Hawthornes in Concord and discussed the idea of the "Agatha" story he had talked of with Hawthorne. This was the last contact between the two writers before Melville visited Hawthorne in Liverpool four years later when Hawthorne had relocated to England.

– Unsuccessful writer

After having borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law in September to buy a acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Melville had high hopes that his next book would please the public and restore his finances.

In April he told his British publisher, Richard Bentley, that his new book had "unquestionable novelty" and was calculated to have wide appeal with elements of romance and mystery. In fact, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities was heavily psychological, though drawing on the conventions of the romance, and difficult in manner.

It was not well received. The New York Day Book published a venomous attack on September 8, , headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY". The item, offered as a news story, reported,

A critical friend, who scan Melville's last book, Ambiguities, between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman.

We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink.

On May 22, , Melville's third child and first daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) was born, and on or about that day Herman finished function on the Agatha story, Isle of the Cross.

Melville traveled to New York to debate a book, presumably Isle of the Cross, with his publisher, but later wrote that Harper & Brothers was "prevented" from publishing his manuscript because it was lost.

After the commercial and critical failure of Pierre, Melville had difficulty finding a publisher for his follow-up novel Israel Potter.

Instead, this narrative of a Revolutionary War veteran was serialized in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in From November to , Melville published fourteen tales and sketches in Putnam's and Harper's magazines. In December he proposed to Dix & Edwards, the new owners of Putnam's, that they publish a selective collection of the short fiction.

The collection, titled The Piazza Tales, was named after a recent introductory story Melville wrote for it, "The Piazza". It also contained five previously published stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno".

On March 2, , the Melvilles' fourth youngster, Frances (Fanny), was born. In this period, his book Israel Potter was published.

The writing of The Confidence-Man put fantastic strain on Melville, leading Sam Shaw, a nephew of Lizzie, to write to his uncle Lemuel Shaw: "Herman I wish has had no more of those ugly attacks"—a reference to what Robertson-Lorant calls "the bouts of rheumatism and sciatica that plagued Melville".

Melville's father-in-law apparently shared his daughter's "great anxiety about him" when he wrote a letter to a cousin, in which he described Melville's working habits: "When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him[self] to hard study many hours in the day, with little or no exercise, and this specially in winter for a great many days together.

He probably thus overworks himself and brings on severe nervous affections".^[] Shaw advanced Melville $1, from Lizzie's inheritance to journey four or five months in Europe and the Holy Land.

From October 11, , to May 20, , Melville made a six-month Grand Tour of Europe and the Mediterranean.

While in England, in November , he briefly reunited for three days with Hawthorne, who had taken the position of Combined States Consul at Liverpool, at that time the hub of Britain's Atlantic trade. At the nearby coast resort of Southport, amid the sand dunes where they had stopped to smoke cigars, they had a conversation that Hawthorne later described in his journal:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he 'pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated' [] If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.^{[][full citation needed]}

The Mediterranean part of the tour took in the Holy Land, which inspired his epic poem Clarel. During the tour he visited Mount Pray, a Christian farm near Jaffa.^[] On April 1, , Melville published his last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man.

This novel, subtitled His Masquerade, has won general acclaim in modern times as a complex and mysterious exploration of issues of fraud and honesty, identity and masquerade. However, when it was published, it received reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.

– Poet

To repair his faltering finances, Melville took up public lecturing from late to He embarked upon three lecture tours and spoke at lyceums, chiefly on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome.

Melville's lectures, which mocked the pseudo-intellectualism of lyceum culture, were panned by contemporary audiences. On May 30, , Melville boarded the clipperMeteor for California, with his brother Thomas at the helm. After a shaky trip around Cape Horn, Melville returned to New York alone via Panama in November.

Later that year, he submitted a poetry collection to a publisher but it was not accepted, and is now lost. In , he bought his brother's dwelling at East 26th Street in New York City and moved there.

In , Melville visited the Virginia battlefields of the American Civil War.

After the war, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (), a collection of 72 poems that has been described as "a polyphonic verse journal of the conflict". The work did not do well commercially—of the print run of 1, copies, were sent as review copies, and copies were sold—and reviewers did not realize that Melville had purposely avoided the ostentatious diction and fine writing that were in fashion, choosing to be concise and spare.^[]

In , Melville became a customs inspector for New York City.

He held the post for 19 years and had a reputation for honesty in a notoriously corrupt institution. (Unbeknownst to Melville, his position was sometimes protected by future American president Chester A. Arthur, then a customs official who admired Melville's writing but never spoke to him.) During these years, Melville suffered from nervous exhaustion, physical pain, and frustration, and would sometimes, in the words of Robertson-Lorant, behave like the "tyrannical captains he had portrayed in his novels", perhaps even beating his wife Lizzie when he came home after drinking.

In Malcolm, the Melvilles' older son, died in his bedroom at residence at the age of 18 from a self-inflicted gun shot, perhaps intentional, perhaps accidental. In May , Lizzie's brother Sam, who shared his family's terror for Melville's sanity, tried to arrange for her to abandon Melville.

Lizzie was to stop by her family in Boston and assert to a court that her husband was insane. But Lizzie, whether to avoid the social shame divorce carried at the time or because she still loved her husband, refused to go along with the plan.

Though Melville's professional writing career had ended, he remained assigned to his writing.

He spent years on what Milder called "his autumnal masterpiece" Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage (), an 18,line epic poem inspired by his trip to the Holy Land. It is among the longest single poems in American literature. The title ethics is a young American scholar of divinity who travels to Jerusalem to renew his faith.

One of the central characters, Rolfe, is similar to Melville in his younger days, a seeker and adventurer, while the reclusive Vine is loosely based on Hawthorne, who had died twelve years before. Publication of copies was funded with a bequest from his uncle in , but sales failed miserably and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to buy them at charge.

Critic Lewis Mumford found an unread copy in the Recent York Public Library in "with its pages uncut".

– Final years

Melville's own income remained limited. But in , Lizzie received a legacy that enabled him to buy a steady stream of books and prints each month.

Melville retired on December 31, , after several of his wife's relatives further supported the couple with supplementary legacies and inheritances.

Herman Melville was born in New York City in He worked as a crew member on several vessels commencing inhis experiences spawning his victorious early novels Typee and Omoo Subsequent books, including his masterpiece Moby-Dicksold poorly, and by the s Melville had turned to poetry. Following his death in New York City inhe posthumously came to be regarded as one of the great American writers.

On February 22, , Stanwix, their younger son, died in San Francisco at age 36, from tuberculosis. In , Melville became a member of the New York Society Library.

Melville had a modest revival of popularity in England when readers rediscovered his novels.

He published two collections of poems inspired by his early experiences at sea, with prose head notes. Intended for his relatives and friends, each had a publish run of 25 copies. The first, John Marr and Other Sailors, was published in , followed by Timoleon in

Melville died on the morning of September 28, His death certificate shows "cardiac dilation" as the cause.

He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Bronx, New York City.

The New York Times' initial death notice called his masterpiece "Mobie Dick", the misspelling of which was later erroneously taken to mean that he was unappreciated at his time of death.^[] But there were some appreciations.

The Times, for instance, published a substantial article of appreciation on October 2. The author said that thinking back to Melville's books that were so much peruse forty years earlier, there is "no difficulty determining why they were then read and talked about," but the difficulty is "to discover why they are read and talked about no longer."

Melville left a volume of poetry, Weeds and Wildings, and a sketch, "Daniel Orme", unpublished at the time of his death.

His wife also establish pages for an unfinished novella, titled Billy Budd. Melville had revised and rearranged the manuscript in several stages, leaving the pages in disarray. Lizzie could not decide her husband's intentions (or even read his handwriting in some places) and abandoned attempts to edit the manuscript for publication.

The pages were stored in a family breadbox until when Melville's granddaughter gave them to Raymond Weaver. Weaver, who initially dismissed the work's importance, published a quick transcription in This version, however, contained many misreadings, some of which affected interpretation.

It was an immediate critical success in England, then in the United States. In , the Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts published a critical reading text that was widely acknowledged. It was adapted as a stage play on Broadway in , then an opera, and in as a film.

Writing style

General narrative style

Melville's writing style shows both consistencies and enormous changes throughout the years.

His growth "had been abnormally postponed, and when it came, it came with a rush and a force that had the menace of quick exhaustion in it". As early as "Fragments from a Writing Desk", written when Melville was 20, scholar Sealts sees "a number of elements that anticipate Melville's later writing, especially his characteristic habit of abundant literary allusion".Typee and Omoo were documentary adventures that called for a division of the narrative in short chapters.

Such compact organization bears the peril of fragmentation when applied to a lengthy work such as Mardi, but with Redburn and White Jacket, Melville turned the short chapter into a concentrated narrative.

Some chapters of Moby-Dick are no more than two pages in standard editions, and an extreme example is Chapter , consisting of a single paragraph of 36 words.

The skillful handling of chapters in Moby-Dick is one of the most fully developed Melvillean signatures, and is a measure of his masterly writing style (something that would lend lasting significance to the opening lines "Call me Ishmael").

Herman Melville - Books, Quotes & Moby Dick - Biography: Herman Melville (born Melvill; [ a ] August 1, – September 28, ) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (); Typee (), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella.

Individual chapters have become "a touchstone for appreciation of Melville's art and for explanation" of his themes. In contrast, the chapters in Pierre, called Books, are divided into short-numbered sections, seemingly an "odd formal compromise" between Melville's natural length and his purpose to write a regular adoration that called for longer chapters.

As satirical elements were introduced, the chapter arrangement restores "some degree of organization and pace from the chaos". The usual chapter unit then reappears for Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man and even Clarel, but only becomes "a vital part in the whole creative achievement" again in the juxtaposition of accents and of topics in Billy Budd.

Newton Arvin points out that only superficially the books after Mardi seem as if Melville's writing went back to the vein of his first two books.

In reality, his movement "was not a retrograde but a spiral one", and while Redburn and White Jacket may lack the spontaneous, youthful charm of his first two books, they are "denser in substance, richer in feeling, tauter, more complex, more connotative in texture and imagery".

The rhythm of the prose in Omoo "achieves minuscule more than easiness; the language is almost neutral and without idiosyncrasy", while Redburn shows an improved ability in narrative, which fuses imagery and emotion.

Melville's preceding works were "increasingly baroque" in style, and with Moby-Dick Melville's vocabulary had grown superabundant.

Walter Bezanson calls it an "immensely varied style". According to critic Warner Berthoff, three characteristic uses of language can be acknowledged. First, the exaggerated repetition of words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied", and "piteous".

A second typical device is the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness". A third characteristic is the presence of a participial modifier to highlight and to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene&#;" "In this foreshadowing interval&#;").

After his use of hyphenated compounds in Pierre, Melville's writing gives Berthoff the impact of becoming less exploratory and less provocative in his choices of words and phrases.

Instead of providing a lead "into possible meanings and openings-out of the material in hand," the vocabulary now served "to crystallize governing impressions," the diction no longer attracted attention to itself, except as an effort at exact definition.

The language, Berthoff continues, reflects a "controlling intelligence, of right judgment and completed understanding". The sense of free inquiry and exploration that infused his earlier writing and accounted for its "rare force and expansiveness," tended to give way to "static enumeration".

By comparison to the verbal music and kinetic energy of Moby-Dick, Melville's subsequent writings seem "relatively muted, even withheld" in his later works.

Melville's paragraphing in his finest work Berthoff considers to be the virtuous result of "compactness of form and free assembling of unanticipated further data", such as when the mysterious sperm whale is compared with Exodus's invisibility of God's face in the final paragraph of Chapter 86 ("The Tail").

Over day Melville's paragraphs became shorter as his sentences grew longer, until he arrived at the "one-sentence paragraphing characteristic of his later prose". Berthoff points to the opening chapter of The Confidence-Man for an example, as it counts fifteen paragraphs, seven of which consist of only one elaborate sentence, and four that have only two sentences.

The use of similar technique in Billy Budd contributes in grand part, Berthoff says, to its "remarkable narrative economy".

Style and literary allusion

In Nathalia Wright's view, Melville's sentences generally possess a looseness of structure, effortless to use for devices as catalogue and allusion, parallel and refrain, proverb and allegory.

The length of his clauses may vary greatly, but the narrative style of writing in Pierre and The Confidence-Man is there to convey feeling, not mind. Unlike Henry James, who was an innovator of sentence ordering to render the subtlest nuances in thought, Melville made limited such innovations.

His domain is the mainstream of English prose, with its rhythm and simplicity influenced by the King James Bible. Another important characteristic of Melville's writing style is in its echoes and overtones. Melville's imitation of certain distinct styles is responsible for this.

His three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. Direct quotation from any of the sources is slight; only one sixth of his Biblical allusions can be qualified as such because Melville adapts Biblical usage to his own narrated textual requirements.

The Biblical elements in Melville's style can be divided into three categories.

In the first, allusion is more within the narrative rather than formal quotation. Several preferred Biblical allusions appear repeatedly throughout his body of work, taking on the nature of refrains. Examples are the injunctions to be 'as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves,' 'death on a pale horse,' 'the man of sorrows', the 'many mansions of heaven;' proverbs 'as the hairs on our heads are numbered,' 'pride goes before a fall,' 'the wages of sin is death;' adverbs and pronouns as 'verily, whoso, forasmuch as; phrases as approach to pass, children's children, the fat of the land, vanity of vanities, outer darkness, the apple of his eye, Ancient of Days, the rose of Sharon.' Second, there are paraphrases of individual and combined verses.

Redburn's "Thou shalt not lay stripes upon these Roman citizens" makes use of language of the Ten Commandments in Previous boyfriend and Pierre's inquiry of Lucy: "Loveth she me with the love past all understanding?" combines John –17, and Philippians ^[e] Third, certain Hebraisms are used, such as a succession of genitives ("all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob"), the cognate accusative ("I dreamed a dream", "Liverpool was created with the Creation"), and the parallel ("Closer home does it proceed than a rammer; and fighting with steel is a act without ever an interlude").

This passage from Redburn shows how these ways of alluding interlock and result in a texture of Biblical language though there is very little direct quotation:

The other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus' hour, was found in the New; and the deep-sea land, that first struck these soundings, brought up the soil of Earth's Paradise.

Not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so at God's pleasant pleasure,