Literature · Novelists

Herman Melville

1819–1891 · American

American Renaissance; Dark Romanticism

Herman Melville was a New York-born novelist whose years at sea, including service on the whaler Acushnet and time among the Typee people of the Marquesas, gave him the material for his early bestsellers. His masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851) sold poorly, and he spent nearly two decades as a customs inspector in New York, dying in obscurity. A revival in the 1920s, helped by the posthumous publication of Billy Budd, established him as one of the greatest American writers.

How to spot them

▸Moby-Dick: Captain Ahab, the Pequod, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck and the white whale
▸'Call me Ishmael' - one of the most famous opening lines in literature
▸Bartleby, the Scrivener: the clerk who says 'I would prefer not to'
▸South Seas adventures Typee and Omoo; dedicated Moby-Dick to Nathaniel Hawthorne
▸Billy Budd, the handsome sailor, published posthumously and made into an opera by Benjamin Britten

Key works

Typee (1846)

His first book, a lightly fictionalised account of his stay among the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands

Omoo (1847)

Sequel to Typee, following his wanderings in Tahiti

White-Jacket (1850)

Life aboard a US Navy frigate; its attack on flogging fed the campaign that ended it

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

Captain Ahab's monomaniacal hunt for the white whale, narrated by Ishmael aboard the Pequod

Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)

Short story of a Wall Street copyist who passively refuses all tasks with 'I would prefer not to'

Benito Cereno (1855)

Novella about a slave revolt aboard a Spanish ship, concealed from a naive American captain

The Confidence-Man (1857)

Satire set on a Mississippi steamboat on April Fool's Day; the last novel published in his lifetime

Billy Budd, Sailor (Written c. 1886–1891; published 1924)

A good-natured sailor hanged after killing the malicious master-at-arms Claggart

Key ideas

Moby-Dick blends adventure, encyclopaedic whaling lore, Shakespearean soliloquy and metaphysical speculation
The whale's whiteness as an image of an unknowable, perhaps indifferent universe
Rediscovered in the 'Melville Revival' of the 1920s after dying almost forgotten

Quick-fire facts

•Sailed on the whaler Acushnet in 1841 and deserted in the Marquesas in 1842
•Moby-Dick was first published in London, as The Whale, a few weeks before the American edition
•The sinking of the whaleship Essex by a sperm whale in 1820 helped inspire Moby-Dick
•He dedicated Moby-Dick to his friend and neighbour Nathaniel Hawthorne
•Wrote Moby-Dick at Arrowhead, his farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts
•Worked for about 19 years as a customs inspector in New York City
•The coffee chain Starbucks is named after Starbuck, Ahab's first mate
•Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd (1951) had a libretto co-written by E. M. Forster
•Also a poet: Battle-Pieces (1866), on the Civil War, and the long poem Clarel (1876)

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Sources

Hershel Parker — Herman Melville: A Biography
Andrew Delbanco — Melville: His World and Work