A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: American novelist and poet, a major literary figure whose exploration of psychological and metaphysical themes foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns. The fictionalized travel narrative of Typee (1846) was Melville's most popular book during his lifetime, but his works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. Melville is best-known for his novels of the sea and his masterpiece Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851), a whaling adventure dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville was born in New York City, into a family whose fortunes had declined. He was the third child of eight. His father, Allan Melvill, an importer of French dry goods, became bankrupt and insane, dying when Melville was 12. His mother, Maria Gansevoort Melvill, was left alone to raise eight children. He left the school and was largely autodidact, devouring Shakespeare as well as historical, anthropological, and technical works. He became a bank clerk, but in search of adventure in 1839 he shipped to Liverpool, England, as a cabin boy. When he returned to the United States he taught school and then sailed for the South Seas in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18-month voyage Melville deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for a month among the natives, who were cannibals. He escaped aboard an Australian trader, leaving it at Papeete, Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field laborer and then shipped to Honolulu, Hawaii, where in 1843 he enlisted as a seaman on the U.S. Navy frigate United States. Melville's first five novels all achieved quick popularity. His adventures in the Marquesas and Tahiti inspired his first two books, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), an account of his stay with the cannibals, and its sequel, Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), based on his experiences in Polynesian Islands. Throughout his career Melville enjoyed a rather higher estimation in Britain than in America. His older brother Gansevoort held a government position in London, and helped to launch Melville's career. From his third book, Mardi & a Voyage Thither (1849), a complex allegorical fantasy, Melville started to take distance to the expectations of his readers. Redburn, His First Voyage (1849), based on Melville's first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (1850), a fictionalization of his experiences in the navy, exposed the abuse of sailors that was prevalent in the U.S. Navy at that time. In 1847 Melville married Elisabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts, and in 1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated his masterpiece, Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851). The central theme of this novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab's legs at the knee. Ahab is dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, the narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections include the rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy “flats,” passages conveying nonnarrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages, such as the tale of the Tally-Ho. These sections can stand by themselves as short stories of merit. The work is invested with Ishmael's sense of profound wonder at his story, but it nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahab's quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew. The only survivor is the narrator, Ishmael, who is rescued by a passing ship. The reader is confronted by a plurality of linguistic discourses, philosophical speculations, and Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging. When the novel was published, it did not bring him the fame he had acquired in the 1840s. Readers of Typee and Omoo were not expecting this kind of story, and its brilliance was only noted by some critics. Through the story Melville meditated questions about faith and the workings of God's intelligence. Moby-Dick was not a financial success -it sold only some 3,000 copies during Melville's lifetime-, and Melville's next novel, Pierre: or the Ambiguities (1852), a a Gothic romance and psychological study based on the author's childhood and an allegorical exploration of the nature of evil, was a critical and financial failure. Today, however, it enjoys some acceptance by critics and the public. Israel Potter (1855), a historical romance, was equally unsuccessful. Although he became to be regarded as one of the USA's greatest writers, he did not have any great success in his lifetime and became disillusioned. The Piazza Tales (1856) contains some of Melville's finest shorter works; particularly notable are the powerful short stories Benito Cereno (1855) and Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), a story about a man, who confronts life with an Everlasting Nay - "I would prefer not to," is his quiet defense against onrushing materialism of the day; and the ten descriptive sketches of the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, titled The Encantadas (1854). The unfinished novel The Confidence-Man (1857), was a harsh satire of American life set on a Mississippi River steamboat. After 1857 he wrote only some poetry. His health was failing, he did not earn enough money to support his family, and he was a dependent of his wealthy father-in-law. Between 1866 and 1885 Melville worked as a customs inspector in New York City in order to support himself. During this period he published poetry that has since gained increasing respect, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), and the book-length Clarel (1876), a long poem about religious crisis, was based on this strip, and reflected his Manichean view of God. The book was ignored. Subsequent works were privately printed and distributed among a very small circle of acquaintances. Melville's later works include privately printed John Marr and other sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891). His last work was the novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), a story left unfinished at his death. Its manuscript was found in Melville's desk when he died and was published posthumously. It is the story of a young sailor, personifying innocence, who is doomed by the malevolent hatred of a ship's officer, personifying evil. The subtle, but pervasive homoerotic undertones of Herman Melville's writing was first noted by Leslie Fiedler, (1960). The work was adapted as an opera in 1951 by the English composer Benjamin Britten in collaboration with the English novelist E. M. Forster, and both as a play and as a film in 1962. Melville's death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice. Selected works:
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