Comprehensive information and links about Herman Melville

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, essayist, and poet. During his lifetime his early novels were popular, but his popularity declined later in his life. By the time of his death he had nearly been forgotten, but his masterpiece,

Life

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819 as the third child to Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill (Maria would later add an 'e' to the surname), and received his early education in that city. One of his grandfathers, Major Thomas Melvill, participated in the Boston Tea Party. Another was General Peter Gansevoort who was acquainted with James Fenimore Cooper and defended Fort Stanwix in 1777. His father had described the young Melville as being somewhat slow as a child and Melville was also weakened by the scarlet fever, permanently affecting his eyesight. The family importing business went bankrupt in 1830, and the family went to Albany, New York, with Herman entering Albany Academy. Prior to that year, he attended Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in Manhattan. After the death of his father in 1832, the family (with eight children) moved to the village of Lansingburgh on the Hudson River. Herman and his brother Gansevoort were forced to work to help support the family. There Herman remained until 1835, when he attended the Albany Classical School for some months.

Melville's roving disposition, and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance, led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a cabin boy in a New York vessel bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, visited London, and returned in the same ship. , published in 1849, is partly founded on the experiences of this trip. A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840, was occupied with school-teaching. At any rate, he once more signed a ship's articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts harbour in the whaler , bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. He has left very little direct information as to the events of this eighteen months' cruise, although his whaling romance, probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet. Melville decided to abandon the vessel on reaching the Marquesas Islands. He lived among the natives of the island for several weeks and the narrative of , tell this tale. After a sojourn at the Society Islands, Melville shipped for Honolulu. There he remained for four months, employed as a clerk. He joined the crew of the American frigate United States, which reached Boston, stopping on the way at one of the Peruvian ports, in October of 1844. Upon his return, he recorded his experiences in the books, , published in the following six years.

Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of noted jurist, Lemuel Shaw) on August 4, 1847. The Melvilles resided in New York City until 1850, when they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (which is today a museum). Here Melville remained for thirteen years, occupied with his writing, and managing his farm. There he befriended Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived in the area. There he wrote , works that did not achieve the same popular and critical success as his earlier books.

While at Pittsfield, because of financial reasons, Melville was induced to enter the lecture field. From 1857 to 1860 he spoke at lyceums, chiefly speaking of his adventures in the South Seas. He also became a customs inspector for the City of New York, a post he held for 19 years. After an illness that lasted a number of months, Herman Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York. In his later life, his works no longer accessible to a broad audience, he was not able to make money from writing. He depended on his wife's family for money along with his other attempts at employment. His short novel at the time of his death, was published in 1924 and later turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, a play, and a film by Peter Ustinov.

In , Walter Donald Kring, PHD detailed his discovery of an old document listing Melville as a former member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls. Until the advent of this revelation, little had been known of his religious leanings.

has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest American novels. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville also wrote and many short stories and works of various genres. His short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" is among his most important pieces, and has been considered a precursor to Existentialist and Absurdist literature. Melville's short stories The Tartarus of Maids and The Paradise of Bachelors, as well as his posthumous novella Billy Budd have been seen by some contemporary critics as anticipating key issues in the fields of gender studies and queer studies. For example, the critic Eve Sedgewick has made notable contributions to the understanding of gender and sexuality in Melville's fiction. Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until late in life; after the Civil War, he published , which sold well. But again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative , about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite unknown in his own time. This may be the longest single poem in American literature. His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States.

The Melville Revival

After the success of his stories and travelogues based on voyages to the the South Seas during his youth Melville's popularity declined. In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized as only a minor figure in American literature. The publication in 1921 of began a revival in critical studies of Melville's work. This work was followed by a string of important criticism and biography, including Jay Leyda's . Due to these works and the subsequent profusion of research on Melville's work Melville became universally recognized as a major canonical figure. Today he may be the most written-about American author.

"The Piazza" -- the only story specifically written for the collection. (The other five had previously been published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine.)