Melville Bio

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891)

Herman Melville was the third of eight children born to a socially well-connected family in New York City. The family's import business collapsed in 1830, and Melville was forced into full-time work during his early adolescent years. He was already writing fiction by the mid-1830's. In 1839, Melville served as a cabin boy on the St. Lawrence, a merchant ship sailing from New York City to Liverpool. Melville was not immediately attracted to the life of the sailor. He sought other employment following his first brief voyage, and it was only in January of 1841 that he joined the crew of another ship -- the Acushet, a whaler bound for the South Seas. Melville's adventures in the South Seas became the subject of his first novel, Typee (1846), and his involvement in a mutiny inspired his second novel, Omoo (1847). Both novels sold well, and Melville settled into a career as a popular novelist and magazine contributor. In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts. His semi-allegorical third book, Mardi, deviated from the formula of his earlier adventure novels and received a cool response from readers; his next two novels, written in rapid succession, returned to the genre which had proven appeal. In 1850, Melville bought a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts and developed a close friendship with his neighbor, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville's conversations with Hawthorne in 1850, along with his immersion in Shakespeare's plays, changed the course of his work in progress -- another adventure novel about the hunt for a whale. Moby Dick appeared in October of 1851 and, like Mardi, was a commercial failure. Pierre, published the following year, was yet another critical and financial failure. A fire at his New York publisher in 1853 destroyed the plates of his previous books and signaled an end to his early success as a writer. Melville continued to publish shorter pieces in Putnam's Monthly Magazine (including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby the Scrivener"), and he earned some money from three American lecture tours. An 1866 appointment as a customs inspector in New York City finally brought Melville a secure income. He settled in New York City and lived there for the remainder of his life. Melville gradually abandoned the novel after 1860 in favor of poetry. In his final work he returned to prose, though Billy Budd remained unfinished at the time of his death and was not published until 1924. Melville died in almost complete obscurity in 1891, his death eliciting only a brief obituary in a New York newspaper.

Selected Works:

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
White Jacket (1850)
Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852)
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855)
The Piazza Tales (1856)
The Confidence Man (1857)
Billy Budd (written between 1888 and 1891; published in 1924)

The complete text of The Piazza Tales (the collection in which "Benito Cereno" first appeared) is available online:
http://www.esp.org/books/melville/piazza/contents/contents.html