Herman Melville Biography

Dromo's Den

MELVILLE, Herman (1819–91). An American novelist, born in New York City and noteworthy for his stories of the sea. He was educated at the Albany Classical School and in New York City, and went to sea in 1837 in a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool. In 1841 he rounded Cape Horn on a whaling cruise, and was so ill treated that in the next year he and a companion made their escape from the ship and were taken captives by the Typees, a warlike tribe of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands. His companion soon escaped and Melville was finally rescued after four months by the crew of an Australian whaler. He spent the next two years (1842–44) in and about the Pacific Islands, and on his return to New York told the story of his experiences at sea and his romantic captivity in Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life during a Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas (1846), which enjoyed a sensational and not undeserved success. In 1847 Melville married the daughter of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts. In 1850 he moved with his family to Pittsfield, Mass., but returned in 1863 to New York. There he occupied a place in the customhouse continuously from 1866 till 1885, when because of failing health he resigned. The period of his popularity, embraced in the years 1846–52, was one of rapid production of such stories as Omoo (1847); Mardi (1848); Redburn: His First Voyage (1848); White Jacket, or the World in a Man of War (1850), in which the horrors of flogging in the navy were so graphically set forth that the abolition of the practice soon followed; Moby Dick, or the White Whale (1851); and Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852). After 1852 he published three other volumes of fiction, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855); Piazza Tales (1856); The Confidence Man (1857); and later several books of poems,

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 378-379.