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The Life of Herman Melville

(1819-1891)

            Herman Melville was an American author who wrote robust and allegorical novels about the sea. Critics at the time regarded Melville as merely a second-rate writer who had survived his coruscation; a writer of opuscule novels who would not be remembered past his creative epiphany. Today, however, he is regarded as one of America's greatest writers, despite the vilification of his work by the book reviewers of his time. The work he is primarily remembered for is MOBY-DICK (1851), a novel depicting the infamous Captain Ahab sailing the sea, seeking revenge on the white whale that took his leg.

            Herman Melvill was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City. His father was Allan Melvill, an importer of noble lineage; Allan’s father, Thomas Melvill, had been a major in General Washington's army during the American Revolution. Herman's mother was Maria Gansevoort, the daughter of General Peter Gansevoort, the "hero of Fort Stanwix." The Melvills were an affluent and intelligent couple slowly climbing the social ladder when their second son, Herman, was born. Their prosperity was not to last long, however. When Herman was only eleven, his father went bankrupt after his importing business hit a serious hitch. In 1830, Melvill moved his family to Albany, New York, where he became a part owner of a factory that made fur caps. Having to support a family that now included eight children, Thomas was quickly worn down, and became highly susceptible to illness. In 1832, following a trip to New York City, thirteen-year-old Herman's father died of pneumonia.

            In order to help support their family, Herman and his older brother Gansevoort dropped out of school and acquired jobs. The sixteen-year-old Gansevoort took over his dad father's fledgling fur business, but failed to keep the factory from bankruptcy. Herman took a job at a bank, as well as at the fur cap factory until its fore mentioned bankruptcy in 1837. Later that year, Herman taught at the Sikes District School, an experience that left him avowed to avoid teaching to the best of his ability. Having not received a full education at this point, Herman Melville (his mother had changed the spelling of the surname after the death of Thomas for reasons unknown) became a bibliophile, immersing himself in Shakespeare and other classic authors. Failing to find a profession that suited him, Melville entered the Langingburg Academy, and took a course in surveying. His attempts at finding a job that required the skill, however, were unsuccessful. After a brief stint teaching again in 1839, Melville became a cabin boy on a whaler known as the Acushnet.

            The twenty-one-year-old Melville sailed the sea for a year, absorbing the environment and taking note on the mannerisms and attitudes of his shipmates. After having little success whaling, the Acushnet dropped anchor. Melville and a shipmate, Richard Tobias Greene, decided to abandon the unsuccessful whaler. They entered the bowls of the Marquesas Island, and soon came into contact with a cannibal tribe of island natives known as the Typee. "Toby," as friends knew Greene, was allowed to leave the tribe, and Melville was left alone in the hands of the Typee for close to a month. Eventually an Australian whaler called the Lucy Ann rescued and recruited the twenty-two-year-old Melville. Finding this vessel no better than the Acushnet, Melville abandoned the whaler, and in 1843, he enlisted with the United States Navy. Fitting in better on a Navy ship than any of the unsuccessful whalers, Melville stayed aboard for fourteen months until he was honorably discharged in 1844. After leaving the Navy, Melville proceeded to Lansingburg New York, where his mother and younger siblings now lived.

            Deciding to write of his adventures on the sea, Melville settled down at his mother's new home, and began writing TYPEE (1846), a dramatization of his experiences with the Typee tribe. Though the work is non-fiction and inspired by Melville's experiences, the author incorporated a number of obviously fictional elements that had many critics doubting the authenticity of the account. However, when the supposedly dead Toby Greene, the shipmate who left Melville with the Typee, came forward and verified the story, all of the nays Sayers were silenced. TYPEE proved to be a success both critically and financially, having a good run in both Great Britain and America. Publishers were soon clamoring for Melville to write a sequel, and in 1847, OMOO was published. The novel depicted more of Melville's experiences with the Typee, and was as successful as TYPEE. Following OMOO were MARDI, REDBURN, and WHITE-JACKET, all of which were published in 1849, and focused on Melville's adventures on the sea.

            In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw, and after achieving only moderate success with the three novels published in 1849, the young writer decided to move to a quiet and serene location where he could write unperturbed. Taking the example of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom Melville had befriended on a picnic with an editor friend earlier that year, the family moved in an old farmhouse overlooking Mount Greylock in Berkshire, Massachusetts. After finding numerous pieces of ancient Indian arrowheads in the grasses surrounding the home, Melville christened the house "Arrowhead." The location and its natural beauty inspired the writer, as it had for Hawthorne, who wrote THE SCARLET LETTER in his home overlooking the same mountain. He began writing MOBY-DICK (1851) at the tenacious pace of fifteen hours a day. He sent Hawthorne a piece of the novel, or a "bloody flipper" as Melville referred to it, and the author suggested that Herman allegorize the novel. Taking this tip to heart, Melville revised the novel, and in 1851, MOBY-DICK was published. The story concerns a ship hand named Ishmael witnessing a wily sea captain descend into madness during his quest to kill the white sperm whale Moby-Dick.  While not particularly awe-inspiring at any one point, the overall experience of the novel has captivated readers for years. Though denounced by British critics, MOBY-DICK achieved mostly success with American reviewers. Hawthorne, whom the epic allegory was dedicated to, confided to a friend that Melville's new novel was of "greater power than any of his preceding work." The novel was mainly ignored by the reading audience of the time, and even critics who wrote positive reviews for the novel did not view it as being equal to TYPEE or OMOO.

            Though he hadn't really expected a substantial amount of money for MOBY-DICK, its financial failing was still a disappointment for Melville. In order to make money, the thirty-four-year-old author wrote PIERRE (1852), a novel depicting a young writer and his family. The work did terribly both critically and financially, and Melville became depressed with his lack of success. It has been suggested by his biographers that PIERRE was written out of both distress at the financial failure of MOBY-DICK and pessimism, but the latter quality is only really found in the author's short stories written directly before and after the publication of Melville's last novel, THE CONFIDENCE MAN (1857). The novel concerns the passengers of a steamer and their contact with a shady confidence man. Though successful with British reviewers, THE CONFIDENCE MAN failed to garner any attention in America. At this point, Melville the author had been forgotten by the literary world, and even his correspondence with Nathaniel Hawthorne had begun to falter, although this was most likely because of Melville's moving from "Arrowhead" in 1862 after the family came under considerable debt. The house was sold to Melville's younger brother Allan, and remained a possession of the Melville clan until 1927.

            In 1857, Melville began to make literary tours around America. However, the aging author was only a second-rate lecturer, and after only three years, Melville ended the tour. In 1862, Melville moved back to New York and later became a customs agent on the New York harbor. The job paid a measly four dollars a day, and Melville was probably bored with it after only his first day on the job. Adding to the monotony of his daily life was a decrease in productivity. Melville had stopped writing novels, and instead took to writing poetry. During the Civil War, the author visited the Union battlefront, and the experience was the inspiration for BATTLE PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR (1865), a collection of poetry. Melville's first poetry outing received negative reviews, and sold poorly.

            With a large inheritance given to Elizabeth Melville following the death of a family friend, and with the money earned by Melville when working as a customs officer, the family was doing well financially and was no longer in serious debt. Nevertheless, Melville was not an overly happy man. He was long forgotten in the literary world, and many of his former readers were under the misconception that Melville had died years before. While the recently deceased Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER continued to sell well after its publication MOBY-DICK was selling fewer and fewer copies. With his reputation in the gutter, Melville devoted the next twenty years of his life to his position as a New York customs agent. Towards the end of his life, he began writing again, and the result was BILLY BUDD (1924), a novel about a young man named Billy who is falsely accused of being party to a mutiny. He was never to finish the work completely, however.

            On September 28, 1891, Herman Melville suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of seventy-two. Following the writer's low-publicity passing was a long period in which the author was forgotten entirely. It was only in the roaring 1920s, a period of prosperity and increased creativity following World War I, that Melville gained his reputation as a great American author. In 1924, the manuscript for BILLY BUDD was located among the dead writer's possessions, and was published posthumously to critical acclaim. Like so many famous authors before him, it took a quarter of a century for readers to finally take notice of this master writer.

            The Works of Herman Melville

Written by Cyanne Topaum

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