Herman Melville

Herman Melville (born Herman Melvill) was born in New York City in August 1, 1819 to Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. He was born the third child in a family of four boys and four girls. His ancestors were among the Scottish and Dutch settlers of New York; many had important roles in the American Revolution, and his grandfather, Maj. Thomas Melvill, took part in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. His other grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, is renowned as a hero of the Saratoga Campaign and led the defense of Fort Stanwix against the British, during the American Revolution.

Allan Melvill (1782-1832), Herman Melville's father.

At his birth, and into his young childhood, Herman Melville's family enjoyed a prosperous life due to Allan Melvill's success as a high-end importer and merchant. In the mid-1820s, young Herman Melvill fell ill to scarlet fever, which left his vision permanently impaired. The family moved upstate to Albany in 1830, during Allan Melvill's attempt to move into the fur trade. But he borrowed heavily to finance business interests, and the family's finances were heavily impacted. Following Allan Melvill's sudden death, the family's finances significantly dwindled.

Maria Gansevoort Melvill, mother of Herman Melville.

Following Allan's death, Maria Gansevoort Melvill added the "e" to the family name. Allan's eldest son and Herman's elder brother, Gansevoort, took control of the family's fur and cap business in New York, and Herman clerked at a bank to help keep the family financially afloat. During this time, Herman Melville was enrolled at Albany Academy and Albany Classical School, where he studied classical literature and began writing poems, essays and short stores.

In 1837, Herman left Albany for a teaching job in Massachusetts, but found the work unfulfilling and returned to New York shortly after. Around this same time, Gansevoort's fur and cap business folded, and the Melville family was returned to a dire financial situation. The family relocated to Lansingburgh, New York, and Melville enrolled at Lansingburgh Academy to study surveying—hopeful of gaining employment with the new Erie Canal project.

Crew list of the whaling ship Acushnet listing Herman Melville as a crew member.

At the age of 20, in 1839, Melville decided in order to help support his family and took a job as a cabin boy on the merchant ship the St. Lawrence and took his first voyage across the Atlantic ocean. After this expedition, Melville spent a year exploring the American West, before joining the crew of the whaling ship Acushnet in January of 1841. Melville had signed on to the Acushnet with captain Valentine Pease for a journey of four years. After a year and a half aboard the Acushnet, Melville and a fellow seaman deserted the ship. Eleven of the twenty-six of Acushnet's crew and officers would desert before the four year voyage was over. The two were captured soon after by natives on the Marquesas Islands, often considered or written about as cannibals, known as the Taipi.

Despite the reputation of the Taipi, Melville was treated well during his capture, but after a month he sought rescue on the Australian whale ship Lucy Ann when it arrived at the Marquesas. On the Lucy Ann, Melville traveled to Tahiti where he was involved in a mutiny committed by the crew through refusal of duty. The mutiny saw Melville briefly jailed, before he escaped and sailed to a nearby island Eimeo, now known as Mo'orea, in French Polynesia, where Melville worked on a potato farm. Soon growing bored with life on a potato farm, Melville joined the crew of the whaler Charles and Henry, where he worked as a harpooner under the command of Captain John B. Coleman. Landing at Lahaina, Captain Coleman appeared before John Stetson, United States Vice Commercial Agent at Lahaina, and discharged Herman Melville, along with seaman John Wallace and Joseph Whiting.

Log of the USS United States from August 18 1843 noting the entry of Herman Melville as a crew member.

After his discharge on the islands of Hawaii, Melville took up work as a clerk and bookkeeper in a general store in Honolulu. In August of 1843, Melville enlisted in the U.S. Navy, in part to be able to return to the mainland United States, and he worked as a seaman on the Navy ship USS United States through the Pacific.

Many consider Herman Melville's output or writing work surprising and amazing for a few reasons. The first is because the majority of Herman Melville's novels were written in a twelve year period from 1846 to 1857, which saw Melville stop writing novels at thirty-eight. And the output, both in quantity and quality, is considered incredible given that Melville had little more than an elementary school education, and that he was largely self-educated and self-taught. Despite the difficulties that faced Melville's family in his youth, he was able to read extensively—reading mythology, anthropology, and history, with a noted fascination for Shakespeare and the bard's use of poetic devices to capture an audience. And it has been said that in his youth, Melville was raised listening to the stories of the whale ship Essex, which was a famous ship attacked by a whale and sunk when Melville was a year old.

By October 1844, Melville had returned from whaling and sailing to his mother's house and was determined to write about his adventures. This was in part due to the fascination of family and friends at his telling of stories, and the extensive time he spent during this period reading at his mother's house. Because his writings borrowed from his experience as a seaman and a whaler, and the stories heard during his travels, Melville's descriptions of life at sea were comprehensive and unflinchingly accurate. He proved capable of communicating, through his work, the fear and terror of a whale hunt.

First Edition title page of Typee.

Following his voyages, Melville sat down and wrote his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesia Life (1846). Typee announced some of the themes and enduring interests of Melville's work, such as those of cross-cultural difference and exchange. This book was initially rejected in the United States as publishers did not believe the validity of the story. Instead, the book was accepted in London, where Melville's older brother, Gansevoort, was working at the American Legation. Typee was published in Britain in February of 1846 to favorable reviews that tended to praise the books ethnographic focus on the relationship between a New Englander and a foreign culture. Once a former crewmate of Melville came forward to validate the factual based of the book, it gained further popularity, and gave it a "based-on-a-true-story" status. This status, coupled with a contemporary American interest in maritime adventures, saw Typee sell over 6,000 copies in two years. This success saw the book go through several editions and largely worked to establish Melville as a literary author.

A year after publishing Typee, Melville wrote and published his second novel, Omoo: A Narrative of the Adventures in the South Seas, which was received with a near identical response as Typee. Before the publication of Omoo, and before the public reception of the book was able to confirm Melville's career as a writer, Gansevoort died of a brain disease. This left Melville as the head of the family, which, paired with the success of his second novel, furthered his commitment to supporting his family through his writing. However, due to the pressures of being the head of the family and his recent marriage, Melville tried unsuccessfully for a job in the United States Treasury Department.

In 1847, Melville began work on his third book, Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, which would be published in 1849. When the book appeared, public and critical reception were poor, with many finding the book's allegorical fantasy and the medley of styles incomprehensible. Mardi began as a Polynesian adventure, similar to his previous books, but quickly set the hero of the book in pursuit of the mysterious Yillah, a symbolic quest ending in anguish and disaster.

The title page of White Jacket, Melville's fifth book.

The poor reception of Mardi saw the book sell poorly, and Melville was disappointed in the reception. He followed the book with two quickly written titles: Redburn: His First Voyage in 1849, and White-Jacket (or The World in a Man-of-War) in 1850. Both of these books returned to a writing style similar to those in Typee and Omoo and respectively doubled the sales of Mardi. Further, leading to the publication of White-Jacket, Melville sailed to England to put his London publisher's doubts to rest.

White-Jacket received acclaim from critics for its criticism of abuses in the U.S. Navy and won political support for those criticisms. However, more than the stylistic oddities of Mardi, both Redburn and White-Jacket showed a change in Melville. Both novels contained passages of questioning melancholy, which were, according to some, based on Melville's readings of Shakespeare, with Melville noting the somber passages of Measure for Measure and King Lear. These books were also influenced by the transcendental doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the growing influence of Melville's friend Nathanial Hawthorne and the other author's novel Scarlett Letter, which Melville was supposed to have read in 1850.

In 1851, Melville delivered what would become his signature work, and the work he is most remembered for: Moby-Dick, also known as The Whale. The book has been categorized in the tradition of American Romanticism, and is based both on Melville's experience sailing and aboard whale ships and the real-life disaster of the Essex whaling ship. The story of the Essex was of a whaling ship travelling from Nantucket, Massachusetts to South America, which met its end in the Pacific Ocean in November 1820, when a sperm whale attacked and destroyed the Essex. The crew, adrift in small whale boats, faced storms, thirst, illness, and starvation and were reduced to cannibalism for survival. The tragedy was a widely circulated story in America in the 19th century.

Title page of Moby-Dick, Melville's best-known work.

Part of the writing of Moby-Dick involved Melville's friendship with Nathanial Hawthorne, who was supposed to have read an early manuscript of the book and is said to have encouraged Melville to change the draft into something more like the allegorical novel it later became. Melville had high expectations for the book, but it was poorly received and only sold around 3,000 copies, which was in part due to the dwindling interest in maritime adventures in the contemporary American readership. An 1851, and article in the Illustrated London News called Moby-Dick:

Herman Melville's last and best and most widely imaginative story […and a testament to his] reckless imaginative power [and his] great aptitude for quaint and original philosophical speculation, degenerating, however, too often into rhapsody and purposeless extravagance.

After the disappointment of Moby-Dick's reception, Melville battled against obscurity and financial ruin for the remainder of his life. His subsequent novels, including Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852), Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), and The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) all sold poorly. After the 1857 publication of The Confidence-Man, Melville all but gave up on writing novels. It would not be until the 1910s and 1920s when critics such as D.H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and Lewis Mumford championed Melville's work that there was a "Melville Revival," at which point Melville's place in American Literature was solidified and Moby-Dick was considered a masterpiece of American Literature.

Beginning in 1849, Melville began to work in areas other than writing his novels. This first came on the heels of the success of Melville's first two books, at which point he became a regular contributor of reviews and other pieces to literary journals. Following 1857, and the failure of his novels post Moby-Dick, Melville joined the trend of giving lectures and began a lecture tour. This led him to tour the United States, giving lectures on various topics such as "Statues in Rome," "The South Seas," and the vague "Traveling." In 1863, Melville moved back to the New York City where he found employment as a customer inspectors on the docks.

In his writing, Melville turned away from novels and began writing short pieces and poetry. The failure of his novels cost a significant amount of Melville's savings, and the short pieces and poetry offered him an opportunity to make quick money. In 1866, Melville published a collection called Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Ten years later, in 1876, he published a poetry epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, based on a previous trip to the region. Melville lost money on both collections of poetry, neither of which were successful.

• "The Admiral of the White"
• Weeds and Wildings, with a Rose or Two (unpublished collection)
• "Epistle to Daniel Shepherd"
• "Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh" [sic]
• "The Haglets"
• "To Tom"
• "Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-temple in Arcadia"
• "Puzzlement"
• "The Continents"
• "The Dust-Layers"
• "A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855"
• "A Reasonable Constitution"
• "Rammon"
• "A Ditty of Aristippus"
• "In a Nutshell"
• "Adieu"

These were essays that went uncollected during Melville's lifetime.

• "Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 1" (Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, May 4, 1839)
• "Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 2" (Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, May 18, 1839)
• "Etchings of a Whaling Cruise" (New York Literary World, March 6, 1847)
• "Authentic Anecdotes of 'Old Zack'"
• "Mr. Parkman's Tour" (New York Literary World, March 31, 1849)
• "Cooper's New Novel" (New York Literary World, April 28, 1849)
• "A Thought on Book-Binding" (New York Literary World, March 16, 1850)
• "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (New York Literary World, August 17 and August 24, 1850)

Born in 1819, Melville stopped publishing novels at thirty-eight and would live for another thirty-four years, during which time he wrote the majority of his poetry and short works; it is a period of time that has little information on Melville. When he died of a heart attack, on September 28, 1891, Melville had finished his last novel, which would not be published until 1924, after there had been a renewed interest in his work. When he died, Melville's fame and notoriety had vanished.

Arrowhead farm.

Herman Melville married Elizabeth Shaw on August 4, 1847. Elizabeth Shaw was the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and the newlywed couple moved to New York to live with Melville's family. The family lived there until purchasing Arrowhead, a farm in the Berkshires, in 1850. This move was partially due to Melville's friendship with fellow-author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox, and to whom Melville dedicated his novel Moby-Dick. His marriage to Elizabeth Shaw was in part the finalization of Melville's nautical wanderings and helped him settle for his greatest period of productivity. They would live at he Arrowhead farm for thirteen years, where Melville was occupied with his writing and the management of the farm.

Melville and Elizabeth Shaw produced four children during their marriage: their two sons, Malcom (1849-1867) and Stanwix (1851-1886), and their two daughters, Elizabeth (1835) and Frances (1855). In the later period of Melville's life, the family experienced two tragedies. The first was the suicide of their eldest son, Malcom, in 1867. The second was the death of their other son, Stanwix, in 1886, after a long and debilitating illness. These tragedies have been cited by critics as a possible reason for Melville's lack of productivity during this period.