Melville, Herman (1819-1891)

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Sources

Fiction writer and poet

Early Life. The son of a merchant who specialized in French imports, Herman Melvill (he would add the e as a young man) was sharply affected by his father’s business failure and his apparently suicidal death in 1832. Melvill tried his hand at several occupations, finally choosing to go to sea in 1839 as a crew member on the St. Lawrence. In 1841 he shipped out as a common seaman on the whaling ship Acushnet, bound for the South Seas, but never completed that voyage; instead he and a friend deserted ship at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands and began a two-year adventure that included a month spent with the cannibalistic natives of the Taipi valley, service on an Australian whaler, imprisonment in Tahiti as a suspected mutineer, and working in Hawaii. In August 1843 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy at Honolulu as an ordinary seaman and returned in 1844 to his family in Lansingburgh, New York.

Works. Melville’s sea experiences provided material for his early novels, including Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), both of which were South Seas romances. These were followed in 1849 by Mardi, a more challenging allegorical novel that touched on political and religious is-sues and was a failure economically, and Redburn.(1849) and White-Jacket (1850), two straightforward adventure stories that sold well but which Melville considered to be mere hackwork. His sea voyages also inspired his complicated and deeply metaphysical magnum opus, MobyDick (1851). and the novella “Billy Budd,” which was not published until 1924, thirty-three years after his death in 1891. In addition to his novels Melville wrote shorter pieces such as “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno” and reviews throughout his life, for The Literary World, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Melville’s 1855 novel Israel Potter, for example, was originally published serially in Putnam’s. His review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1850) was at once a tribute to Hawthorne, a close friend of Melville’s, and an important document in the history of American fiction.

Controversy. While Melville’s adventure stories sold well, his more complicated works—Mardi, Moby-Dick, Pierre (1852), and The Confidence—Man (1857)—did not. Moby-Dick, which bristles with detailed information about whales and the whaling industry, focused on how Captain Ahab’s obsession with the great white whale caused him to turn explicitly against God, a position that many nineteenth-century readers found deeply offensive. Pierre, the only one of Melville’s novels not set at sea, was the tragic story of a young man drawn into a complex and possibly incestuous relationship with a young woman who turns out to be his half sister. The story’s violent ending and sexual themes echoed the more lurid sensational fiction published in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s; Melville may have written it in order to tap that particular market. But the novel’s questioning of conventional ideas of familial and sexual virtue left it open to sharp criticism for its immorality since even sensational novels were careful to attach moral lessons to their stories. Finally, The Confidence-Man, which Melville was barely able to get published, was a collection of magazine-style sketches that treated man’s suspiciousness and gullibility, all set on a Mississippi River steamboat on April Fool’s Day. The title character appears throughout the sketches in various disguises, illustrating not only the real-life confidence men who preyed on naive and trusting Americans in the cities and on the frontier but also the larger social and economic forces that had brought the confidence man into being.

Sources

Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891 (New York: Gordian Press, 1969);

Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996).