Melville, Herman

Melville, Herman (1819–91), American novelist and poet. After sailing as a ‘boy’ on a packet to Liverpool in 1839, Melville shipped in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet for the South Seas, where he jumped ship, joined the US Navy, and finally returned three years later to begin writing.

The fictionalized travel narrative of Typee or A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) was Melville's most popular book during his lifetime. After a well-received sequel, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), the perfunctorily plotted Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849) fared less well.

Melville wrote the realistic sea stories Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) and White-Jacket; or The World in a Man-of-War (1850), which he considered pot-boilers. His masterpiece was Moby-Dick, or, The Whale (1851), whose brilliance was noted by some critics and very few readers.

After the critical disaster of Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852), a Gothic romance, Melville wrote anonymous magazine stories, among them ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ and ‘Benito Cereno’, which were collected in The Piazza Tales (1856), and the historical novel Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855) about a neglected hero of the American revolution.

His other works include The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), his last novel, a mordantly nihilistic satire of human gullibility set on the ironically named Mississippi steam-boat Fiddle; Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1865); John Marr and Other Sailors (1888); and Timoleon (1891). Melville died virtually forgotten, with Billy Budd, Foretopman still in manuscript: contemporary misunderstanding, censorship, and neglect, and the subsequent revision of Melville's reputation since the 1920s, have made him a classic case of the artist as reviled Titan. Moby-Dick is the closest approach the United States has had to a national prose epic.