English Literature · 1 books
Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the third of eight children of Allan Melvill, a merchant, and Maria Gansevoort, from a prominent Albany family. He died on September 28, 1891, in New York, largely forgotten by the reading public, employed as a customs inspector on the New York docks — a position he had held for nearly twenty years. The novel for which he is now considered one of the greatest American writers had been out of print for decades when he died. Moby-Dick’s rehabilitation, and Melville’s with it, came in the 1920s, more than thirty years after his death.
His early life gave him the material. When he was eleven his father died, after a period of financial and mental breakdown, leaving the family in difficult circumstances. After some years of schooling and various attempts at employment on shore, Melville went to sea. He sailed on a merchant vessel to Liverpool in 1839, and then, in 1841, shipped on the whaling ship Acushnet out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The whaling voyage would last only eighteen months, because in July 1842 he deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and lived for about a month among the Typee people in the Taipivai valley on the island of Nuku Hiva. He then shipped on another whaler, participated in a minor mutiny in Tahiti that resulted in his brief confinement there, and eventually made his way to Hawaii and home via the US Navy frigate United States, arriving in Boston in 1844. He was twenty-five years old. He had been gone three and a half years.
The literary consequence of these years was immediate. Typee, published in 1846, recounts the time among the Typee in a narrative that mixed autobiography, travel writing, and ethnographic observation; it was a popular success. Omoo, published in 1847, continued the story through Tahiti. Both books sold well, and Melville found himself briefly celebrated as the man who had lived among cannibals. He married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847 and settled in New York.
Mardi, published in 1849, was his first attempt to move beyond the autobiographical Pacific narratives toward allegory and symbolic fiction. It was not well received. He returned to more accessible material with Redburn, also 1849, based on the Liverpool voyage, and White-Jacket, 1850, based on his naval service. These were competent and readable, and they supported his family. But the book he was moving toward was not competent and readable in those terms; it was something else entirely.
Moby-Dick, published in 1851, opens with one of the most famous first sentences in American literature — “Call me Ishmael” — and proceeds from there into a work that is many things at once: a technically precise account of the nineteenth-century whaling industry, a philosophical meditation on obsession, fate, and the limits of human knowledge, a psychological portrait of a man — Captain Ahab — whose fixed idea has destroyed his capacity for ordinary life, and a study of the crew of a ship as a kind of microcosm. Melville dedicated it to his neighbor and friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had encouraged him during the writing. It was received with puzzlement and disappointment. Critics and readers who had enjoyed his Pacific narratives were not prepared for what it was.
Pierre, published in 1852, a novel about a young writer whose psychological unraveling it partly dramatized, was received even less well. Melville continued to write — the short fiction of the 1850s includes some of his most concentrated work, including Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno — but the commercial failure of his fiction was ongoing. He tried lecturing, published poetry, and eventually, in 1866, took the customs post on the New York docks.
He did not stop writing. He composed poetry — the collection Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866 and responding to the Civil War, received little attention. He privately published Clarel, a very long narrative poem based on a journey to Palestine he had made in 1857, in 1876. In the last years of his life he was working on a novella, Billy Budd, which he never finished. It was found among his papers after his death and published in 1924.
He died on September 28, 1891. The New York Times obituary was brief. When the reassessment of the 1920s came — driven in part by the critic Raymond Weaver, who published the first biography in 1921 — readers and writers found in Moby-Dick a work that answered questions the twentieth century was asking: about the destructive force of absolute conviction, about the relationship between an individual will and the indifferent forces of the world, about what it means to pursue a purpose past the point where any rational account of it is possible.
The rediscovery of Moby-Dick in the 1920s — led by critics who recognized in it a precursor to the modernist literary experiments of their own time — was one of the more significant acts of posthumous literary justice in American cultural history. The novel’s mixture of documentary precision, philosophical speculation, and psychological depth turned out to be more relevant to the twentieth century’s concerns than it had been to the nineteenth century’s expectations. It continues to generate new readings and new arguments, which is the practical definition of a living work.
The short prose of the 1850s — Bartleby, the Scrivener; Benito Cereno; The Encantadas; The Lightning-Rod Man — deserves separate recognition. These pieces show Melville in a concentrated, oblique mode that is different from the expansiveness of Moby-Dick and that anticipates, in certain respects, the compressed symbolic fiction of the twentieth century. Bartleby in particular — a scrivener who stops working and responds to all requests with the formula “I would prefer not to” — has attracted an enormous quantity of commentary and remains one of the more suggestive pieces of short fiction in American literature.
At Classics Retold, we have published Melville’s major works in new editions designed for contemporary readers — translations and editions that honor the ambition of what he was attempting and give readers direct access to prose that is still one of the stranger and more rewarding experiences that American literature can offer.
