Herman Melville

Herman Melville
Herman Melville, 1870. Oil painting by Joseph Oriel Eaton
Born	(1819-08-01)August 1, 1819 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	New York City, New York, U.S.
Resting place	Woodlawn Cemetery The Bronx, New York
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, teacher, sailor, lecturer, poet, customs inspector
Genres	Travelogue, captivity narrative, nautical fiction, gothic romanticism, allegory, tall tale
Literary movement	Romanticism
Spouse	Elizabeth Knapp Shaw (1822–1906) (m. 1847)
Children	Malcolm (1849–1867) Stanwix (1851–1886) Elizabeth (1853–1908) Frances (1855–1938)
Signature

Herman Melville (born Melvill; 1 August 1819 – 28 September 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences of Polynesian life, and his masterpiece Moby-Dick (1851).

Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a merchant. Typee, his first book, was followed by a sequel, Omoo (1847). Both were successful and gave him the financial basis to marry Elizabeth Shaw, a daughter of a prominent Boston family. His first novel not based on his own experiences, Mardi (1849), was not well received. His next fictional work, Redburn (1849), and his non-fiction White-Jacket (1850) were given better reviews but did not provide financial security.

Moby-Dick (1851), although now considered one of the great American novels, was not well received among contemporary critics. His psychological novel, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852) was also scorned by reviewers. From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines which were collected in 1856 as The Piazza Tales. In 1857, he traveled to England and then toured the Near East. The Confidence-Man (1857) was the last prose work that he published. He moved to New York to take a position as Customs Inspector and turned to poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War.

In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876, a metaphysical epic. In 1886, his son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, left one volume unpublished, and returned to prose of the sea. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891. The 1919 centennial of his birth became the starting point of the "Melville Revival" with critics rediscovering his work and his major novels starting to become recognized as world classics of prominent importance to contemporary world literature.

Biography

Early life

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan Melvill (1782–1832) and Maria (Gansevoort) Melvill (1791–1872). Herman was the third of eight children in a family of Dutch extraction. His siblings, who played important roles in his career as well as in his emotional life, were Gansevoort (1815–1846); Helen Maria (1817–1888); Augusta (1821–1876); Allan (1823–1872); Catherine (1825–1905); Frances Priscilla (1827–1885); and Thomas (1830–1884), who eventually became a governor of Sailors Snug Harbor. Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Allan Melvill spent much time out of New York and in Europe as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods.

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Melville's father, Allan Melvill (1782–1832), portrait from 1810 by John Rubens Smith, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In his novel Pierre (1852), Melville fictionalized this portrait as the portrait of Pierre's father.

Both of Melville's grandfathers were heroes of the Revolutionary War. Major Thomas Melvill (1751–1832) had taken part in the Boston Tea Party, and his maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort (1749–1812), was famous for having commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in New York in 1777. Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent". Major Melvill sent his son Allan (Herman's father) to France instead of college at the turn of the nineteenth century, where he spent two years in Paris and learned to speak and write French fluently. In 1814, Allan, who subscribed to his father's Unitarianism, married Maria Gansevoort, who was committed to the Dutch Reformed version of the Calvinist creed of her family. The severe Protestantism of the Gansevoort's tradition ensured she was well versed in her Bible in English as well as in Dutch, the language she had grown up speaking with her parents.

On August 19, almost three weeks after his birth, Herman Melville was baptized at home by a minister of the South Reformed Dutch Church. During the 1820s, Melville lived a privileged, opulent life in a household with three or more servants at a time. At four-year intervals, the family would move to more spacious and elegant quarters, finally settling on Broadway in 1828. Allan Melvill lived beyond his means and on large sums he borrowed from both his father and his wife's widowed mother. Although his wife's opinion of his financial conduct is unknown, biographer Hershel Parker suggests Maria "thought her mother's money was infinite and that she was entitled to much of her portion" while her children were young. How well the parents managed to hide the truth from their children is "impossible to know", according to biographer Andrew Delbanco.

In 1830, Maria's family finally lost patience and their support came to a halt, at which point Allan's total debt to both families exceeded $20,000 (equivalent to $444,000 in 2021). The felicity of Melville's early childhood, biographer Newton Arvin writes, depended not so much on wealth as on the "exceptionally tender and affectionate spirit in all the family relationships, especially in the immediate circle". Arvin describes Allan as "a man of real sensibility and a particularly warm and loving father," while Maria was "warmly maternal, simple, robust, and affectionately devoted to her husband and her brood".

Herman's education began when he was five, around the time the Melvills moved to a newly built house at 33 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. Herman and his older brother, Gansevoort, were sent to the New York Male High School. In 1826, the same year that Herman contracted scarlet fever, Allan Melvill described him as "very backwards in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension" at first, but his development increased its pace and Allan was surprised "that Herman proved the best Speaker in the introductory Department". In 1829, both Gansevoort and Herman were transferred to Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School, and Herman enrolled in the English Department on September 28. "Herman I think is making more progress than formerly," Allan wrote in May 1830 to Major Melvill, "& without being a bright Scholar, he maintains a respectable standing, & would proceed further, if he could only be induced to study more—being a most amiable & innocent child, I cannot find it in my heart to coerce him".

Emotionally unstable and behind on paying the rent for the house on Broadway, Herman's father tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. Herman attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, where he took the standard preparatory course, studying reading and spelling; penmanship; arithmetic; English grammar; geography; natural history; universal, Greek, Roman and English history; classical biography; and Jewish antiquities. Parker speculates that he left the Academy in October 1831 because "even the tiny tuition fee seemed too much to pay". His brothers Gansevoort and Allan continued their attendance a few months longer, Gansevoort until March the next year. "The ubiquitous classical references in Melville's published writings," as Melville scholar Merton Sealts observed, "suggest that his study of ancient history, biography, and literature during his school days left a lasting impression on both his thought and his art, as did his almost encyclopedic knowledge of both the Old and the New Testaments".

In December, Herman's father returned from New York City by steamboat, but ice forced him to travel the last seventy miles over two days and two nights in an open horse carriage at −2 degrees Fahrenheit (−19 degrees Celsius), causing him become ill. In early January, he began to show "signs of delirium," and his situation grew worse until his wife felt his suffering deprived him of his intellect. Two months before reaching fifty, Allan Melvill died on January 28, 1832. As Herman was no longer attending school, he likely witnessed these scenes. Twenty years later he described a similar death in Pierre.

1832–1838: After his father's death

The death of Allan caused many major shifts in the family's material and spiritual circumstances. One result was the greater influence of his mother's religious beliefs. Maria sought consolation in her faith and in April was admitted as a member of the First Reformed Dutch Church. Herman's saturation in orthodox Calvinism is for Arvin "surely the most decisive intellectual and spiritual influence of his early life".

Two months after his father's death, Gansevoort entered the cap and fur business. Uncle Peter Gansevoort, a director of the New York State Bank, got Herman a job as clerk for $150 a year (equivalent to $3,600 in 2021). Biographers cite a passage from Redburn when trying to answer what Herman must have felt then: "I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time," the narrator remarks, adding, "I must not think of those delightful days, before my father became a bankrupt ... and we removed from the city; for when I think of those days, something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me". Arvin argues Melville was forced to reckon with the "tormented psychology, of the decayed patrician".

When Melville's paternal grandfather died on September 16, 1832, Maria and her children discovered Allan had borrowed more than his share of his inheritance, meaning Maria received only $20 (equivalent to $500 in 2021). His paternal grandmother died almost exactly seven months later. Melville did his job well at the bank; though he was only fourteen in 1834, the bank considered him competent enough to be sent to Schenectady on an errand. Not much else is known from this period, except that he was very fond of drawing. The visual arts became a lifelong interest. Around May 1834, the Melvilles moved to another house in Albany, a three-story brick house. That same month a fire destroyed Gansevoort's skin-preparing factory, which left him with personnel he could neither employ nor afford. Instead he pulled Melville out of the bank to man the cap and fur store.

In 1835, while still working in the store, Melville enrolled in Albany Classical School, perhaps using Maria's part of the proceeds from the sale of the estate of his maternal grandmother in March 1835. In September of the following year Herman was back in Albany Academy in the Latin course. He also participated in debating societies, in an apparent effort to make up as much as he could for his missed years of schooling. In this period he read Shakespeare—at least Macbeth, whose witch scenes gave him the chance to teasingly scare his sisters. In March 1837, he was again withdrawn from Albany Academy.

Gansevoort served as a role model and support for Melville in many ways throughout his life, at this time particularly in forming a self-directed educational plan. In early 1834 Gansevoort had become a member of Albany's Young Men's Association for Mutual Improvement, and in January 1835 Melville joined. Gansevoort also had copies of John Todd's Index Rerum, a blank register for indexing remarkable passages from books one had read for easy retrieval. Among the sample entries was "Pequot, beautiful description of the war with," with a short title reference to the place in Benjamin Trumbull's A Complete History of Connecticut (Volume I in 1797, and Volume II in 1898) where the description could be found. The two surviving volumes of Gansevoort's are the best evidence for Melville's reading in this period. Gansevoort's entries include books Melville used for Moby-Dick and Clarel, such as "Parsees—of India—an excellent description of their character, & religion & an account of their descent—East India Sketch Book p. 21". Other entries are on Panther, the pirate's cabin, and storm at sea from James Fenimore Cooper's The Red Rover, Saint-Saba.

The Panic of 1837 forced Gansevoort to file for bankruptcy in April. In June, Maria told the younger children they must leave Albany for somewhere cheaper. Gansevoort began studying law in New York City while Herman managed the farm before getting a teaching position at Sikes District School near Lenox, Massachusetts. He taught about 30 students of various ages, including some his own age.

The semester over, he returned to his mother in 1838. In February he was elected president of the Philo Logos Society, which Peter Gansevoort invited to move into Stanwix Hall for no rent. In the Albany Microscope in March, Melville published two polemical letters about issues in vogue in the debating societies. Historians Leon Howard and Hershel Parker suggest the motive behind the letters was a youthful desire to have his rhetorical skills publicly recognized. In May, the Melvilles moved to a rented house in Lansingburgh, almost 12 miles north of Albany. Nothing is known about what Melville did or where he went for several months after he finished teaching at Sikes. On November 12, five days after arriving in Lansingburgh, Melville paid for a term at Lansingburgh Academy to study surveying and engineering. In an April 1839 letter recommending Herman for a job in the Engineer Department of the Erie Canal, Peter Gansevoort says his nephew "possesses the ambition to make himself useful in a business which he desires to make his profession," but no job resulted.

Just weeks after this failure, Melville's first known published essay appeared. Using the initials "L.A.V"., Herman contributed "Fragments from a Writing Desk" to the weekly newspaper Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, which printed it in two installments, the first on May 4. According to Merton Sealts, his use of heavy-handed allusions reveals familiarity with the work of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Walter Scott, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore. Parker calls the piece "characteristic Melvillean mood-stuff" and considers its style "excessive enough [...] to indulge his extravagances and just enough overdone to allow him to deny that he was taking his style seriously". For Delbanco, the style is "overheated in the manner of Poe, with sexually charged echoes of Byron and The Arabian Nights".

1839–1844: Years at sea

On May 31, 1839, Gansevoort, then living in New York City, wrote that he was sure Herman could get a job on a whaler or merchant vessel. The next day, he signed aboard the merchant ship St. Lawrence as a "boy" (a green hand), which cruised from New York to Liverpool; he arrived back in New York October 1. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) draws on his experiences in this journey. Melville resumed teaching, now at Greenbush, New York, but left after one term because he had not been paid. In the summer of 1840 he and his friend James Murdock Fly went to Galena, Illinois to see if his Uncle Thomas could help them find work. Unsuccessful, he and his friend returned home in autumn, very likely by way of St. Louis and up the Ohio River.

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Herman Melville, c. 1846–47. Oil painting by Asa Weston Twitchell

Probably inspired by his reading of Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s new book Two Years Before the Mast, and by Jeremiah N. Reynolds's account in the May 1839 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine of the hunt for a great white sperm whale named Mocha Dick, Melville and Gansevoort traveled to New Bedford, where Melville signed up for a whaling voyage aboard a new ship, the Acushnet. Built in 1840, the ship measured some 104 feet in length, almost 28 feet in breadth, and almost 14 feet in depth. She measured slightly less than 360 tons, had two decks and three masts, but no galleries. Melville signed a contract on Christmas Day with the ship's agent as a "green hand" for 1/175th of whatever profits the voyage would yield. On Sunday the 27th the brothers heard the Reverend Enoch Mudge preach at the Seamen's Bethel on Johnny-Cake Hill, where white marble cenotaphs on the walls memorialized local sailors who had died at sea, often in battle with whales. When he signed the crew list the next day he was advanced $84.

On January 3, 1841, the Acushnet set sail. Melville slept with some twenty others in the forecastle; Captain Valentine Pease, the mates, and the skilled men slept aft. Whales were found near The Bahamas, and in March 150 barrels of oil were sent home from Rio de Janeiro. Cutting in and trying-out (boiling) a single whale took about three days, and a whale yielded approximately one barrel of oil per foot of length and per ton of weight (the average whale weighed 40 to 60 tons). The oil was kept on deck for a day to cool off, and was then stowed down; scrubbing the deck completed the labor. An average voyage meant that some forty whales were killed to yield some 1600 barrels of oil.

On April 15, the Acushnet sailed around Cape Horn, and traveled to the South Pacific, where the crew sighted whales without catching any. Then up the coast of Chile to the region of Selkirk Island and on 7 May, near Juan Fernández Islands, she had 160 barrels. On June 23 the ship anchored for the first time since Rio, in Santa Harbor. The cruising grounds the Acushnet was sailing attracted much traffic, and Captain Pease not only paused to visit other whalers, but at times hunted in company with them. From July 23 into August the Acushnet regularly gammed with the Lima from Nantucket, and Melville met William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who gave him a copy of his father's account of his adventures aboard the Essex. Ten years later Melville wrote in his other copy of the book: "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me".

On September 25 the ship reported 600 barrels of oil to another whaler, and in October 700 barrels. On October 24 the Acushnet crossed the equator to the north, and six or seven days later arrived at the Galápagos Islands. This short visit would be the basis for The Encantadas. On November 2, the Acushnet and three other American whalers were hunting together near the Galápagos Islands; Melville later exaggerated that number in Sketch Fourth of The Encantadas. From November 19 to 25 the ship anchored at Chatham's Isle, and on December 2 reached the coast of Peru and anchored at Tombez near Paita, with 570 barrels of oil on board. On December 27 the Acushnet sighted Cape Blanco, off Ecuador, Point St. Elena was sighted the next day, and on January 6, 1842 the ship approached the Galápagos Islands from the southeast. From February 13 to 7 May, seven sightings of sperm whales were recorded but none killed. From early May to early June the Acushnet gammed several times with the Columbus of New Bedford, which also took letters from Melville's ship; the two ships were in the same area just south of the Equator. On June 16 she carried 750 barrels, and sent home 200 on the Herald the Second. On June 23, the Acushnet reached the Marquesas Islands, and anchored at Nuku Hiva.

A time of some emotional turbulence for Melville ensued over the next summer months. On July 9, 1842, Melville and his shipmate Richard Tobias Greene jumped ship at Nukahiva Bay and ventured into the mountains to avoid capture. Melville's first book, Typee (1845), is loosely based on his stay in or near the Taipi Valley. Scholarly research starting in the 1930s and extending into the twenty-first century has increasingly shown that much if not all of this account was either taken from Melville's readings or exaggerated to dramatize a contrast between idyllic native culture and Western civilization. On August 9, Melville boarded the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, bound for Tahiti, where on arrival he took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in the native Calabooza Beretanee. In October, he and crew mate John B. Troy escaped Tahiti for Eimeo. He then spent a month as beachcomber and island rover ("omoo" in Tahitian), eventually crossing over to Moorea. He drew on these experiences for Omoo, the sequel to Typee In November, he signed articles on the Nantucket whaler Charles & Henry for a six-month cruise (November 1842 − April 1843), and was discharged at Lahaina, Maui in the Hawaiian Islands in May 1843.

After four months of working several jobs, including as a clerk, he joined the US Navy initially as one of the crew of the frigate USS United States as an ordinary seaman on August 20. During the next year, the homeward bound ship visited the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Valparaiso, and then, from summer to fall 1844, Mazatlan, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro, before reaching Boston on October 3. Melville was discharged on October 14. This navy experience is used in White-Jacket (1850) Melville's fifth book. Melville's wander-years created what biographer Arvin calls "a settled hatred of external authority, a lust for personal freedom" and a "growing and intensifying sense of his own exceptionalness as a person," along with "the resentful sense that circumstance and mankind together had already imposed their will upon him in a series of injurious ways". Scholar Milder believes the encounter with the wide ocean, where he was seemingly abandoned by God, led Melville to experience a "metaphysical estrangement" and influenced his social views in two ways: first that he belonged to the genteel classes but sympathized with the "disinherited commons" he had been placed among; second that experiencing the cultures of Polynesia let him view the West from an outsider's perspective.

1845–1850: Successful writer

Richard Tobias Greene, who jumped ship with Melville in the Marquesas Islands and is Toby in Typee, pictured in 1846

Upon his return, Melville regaled his family and friends with his adventurous tales and romantic experiences, and they urged him to put them into writing. Melville completed Typee, his first book, in the summer of 1845 while living in Troy. His brother Gansevoort found a publisher for it in London, where it was published in February 1846 by John Murray and became an overnight bestseller, then in New York on March 17 by Wiley & Putnam. Inspired by his adventures in the Marquesas, the book was far from a reliable autobiographical account.

Melville extended the period his narrator spent on the island by three months, made it appear he understood the native language, and incorporated material from source books he had assembled. Scholar Robert Milder calls Typee "an appealing mixture of adventure, anecdote, ethnography, and social criticism presented with a genial latitudinarianism that gave novelty to a South Sea idyll at once erotically suggestive and romantically chaste".

An unsigned review in the Salem Advertiser written by Nathaniel Hawthorne called the book a "skilfully managed" narrative by an author with "that freedom of view ... which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own". Hawthorne stated:

This book is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life, in that unadulterated state of which there are now so few specimens remaining. The gentleness of disposition that seems akin to the delicious climate, is shown in contrast with the traits of savage fierceness ... He has that freedom of view—it would be too harsh to call it laxity of principle—which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own, a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor, and which makes his book the more wholesome to our staid landsmen.

The depictions of the "native girls are voluptuously colored, yet not more so than the exigencies of the subject appear to require". At about the same time, prior to Melville being introduced to Hawthorne, Melville wrote a review of Hawthorne's "Power of Blackness" stating:

Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom—this, I cannot altogether tell. Certain it is, however, that this power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or another, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly freed.

Pleased but slightly bemused by the adulation of his new public, years later Melville expressed concern that he would "go down to posterity ... as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals'!" The book brought Melville back into contact with his friend Greene, Toby in the book, who wrote confirmed Melville's account in newspapers. The two corresponded until 1863, and sustained a bond for life: in his final years Melville "traced and successfully located his old friend". In March 1847, Omoo, a sequel to Typee, was published by Murray in London, and in May by Harper in New York. Omoo is "a slighter but more professional book," according to Milder. Typee and Omoo gave Melville overnight renown as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As the writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper". In 1847 Melville tried unsuccessfully to find a "government job" in Washington.

Herman Melville's home, Arrowhead, Pittsfield, Massachusetts

In June 1847, Melville and Elizabeth Knapp Shaw were engaged, after knowing each other for approximately three months. Melville had first asked her father, Lemuel Shaw, for her hand in March, but was turned down at the time. Lizzie's father had been a close friend of Melville's father and aunt Nancy, and his friendship with the Melvilles continued after Allan's death. Elizabeth was raised by her grandmother and an Irish nurse. Arvin suggests that Melville's interest in Elizabeth may have been stimulated by "his need of Judge Shaw's paternal presence". They were married on August 4, 1847. Lizzie described their marriage as "very unexpected, and scarcely thought of until about two months before it actually took place". She wanted to be married in church, but they had a private wedding ceremony at home to avoid possible crowds hoping to see the celebrity. The couple honeymooned in Canada, and traveled to Montreal. They settled in a house on Fourth Avenue in New York City (now called Park Avenue).

According to scholars Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Frederick James Kennedy, Lizzie brought the following qualities to their marriage: a sense of religious obligation in marriage, an intent to make a home with Melville regardless of place, a willingness to please her husband by performing such "tasks of drudgery" as mending stockings, an ability to hide her agitation, and a desire "to shield Melville from unpleasantness". The Kennedys conclude their assessment with:

If the ensuing years did bring regrets to Melville's life, it is impossible to believe he would have regretted marrying Elizabeth. In fact he must have realized that he could not have borne the weight of those years unaided—that without her loyalty, intelligence, and affection, his own wild imagination would have had no "port or haven".

Biographer Robertson-Lorant's cites "Lizzie's adventurous spirit and abundant energy," and she suggests that "her pluck and good humor might have been what attracted Melville to her, and vice versa". An example of such good humor appears in a letter about her not yet used to being married: "It seems sometimes exactly as if I were here for a visit. The illusion is quite dispelled however when Herman stalks into my room without even the ceremony of knocking, bringing me perhaps a button to sew on, or some equally romantic occupation". On February 16, 1849, the Melvilles' first child, Malcolm, was born.

In March 1848, Mardi was published by Richard Bentley in London, and in April by Harper in New York. Nathaniel Hawthorne thought it a rich book "with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life". According to Robert Milder, the book began as another South Sea story but, as he wrote, Melville left that genre behind, first in favor of "a romance of the narrator Taji and the lost maiden Yillah," and then "to an allegorical voyage of the philosopher Babbalanja and his companions through the imaginary archipelago of Mardi,"

In October 1849, Redburn was published by Bentley in London, and in November by Harper in New York. The bankruptcy and death of Allan Melville, and Melville's own youthful humiliations surface in this "story of outward adaptation and inner impairment". Biographer Robertson-Lorant regards the work as a deliberate attempt for popular appeal: "Melville modeled each episode almost systematically on every genre that was popular with some group of antebellum readers," combining elements of "the picaresque novel, the travelogue, the nautical adventure, the sentimental novel, the sensational French romance, the gothic thriller, temperance tracts, urban reform literature, and the English pastoral". His next novel, White-Jacket, was published by Bentley in London in January 1850, and in March by Harper in New York.

1850–1851: Hawthorne and Moby-Dick

The earliest surviving mention of Moby-Dick is from early May 1850, when Melville told fellow sea author Richard Henry Dana Jr. it was "half way" written. In June, he described the book to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall. The original manuscript has not survived, but over the next several months Melville radically transformed his initial plan, conceiving what Delbanco has described as "the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer".

From August 4 to 12, 1850, the Melvilles, Sarah Morewood, Evert Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other literary figures from New York and Boston came to Pittsfield to enjoy a period of parties, picnics, dinners, and the like. Nathaniel Hawthorne] and his publisher James T. Fields joined the group while Hawthorne's wife stayed at home to look after the children. Hawthorne and Melville had a deep, private conversation about Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse. Hawthorne invited Melville to stay for a few days, which was unusual because Hawthorne typically felt overnight guests prevented him from working. The following days, Melville wrote the essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses," a review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse that appeared in two installments, on August 17 and 24, in The Literary World. Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black".

Later that summer, Melville received a package from Duyckinck with a letter asking him to forward it to Hawthorne. When he delivered the package to Hawthorne, he did not know it contained his last three books. Hawthorne read them, as he wrote to Duyckinck on August 29, "with a progressive appreciation of their author". He thought Melville in Redburn and White-Jacket put the reality "more unflinchingly" before his reader than any writer, and he thought Mardi was "a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life. It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better". In September 1850, Melville borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw to buy a 160-acre farm in Pittsfield. Melville called his new home Arrowhead because of the arrowheads that were dug up around the property during planting season.

That winter, Melville on an impulse paid Hawthorne a visit, only to discover he was "not in the mood for company" as he was finishing The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne's wife Sophia entertained him while he waited for Hawthorne to come down for supper, and gave him copies of Twice-Told Tales and, for Malcolm, The Grandfather's Chair. Melville invited them to visit Arrowhead some time in the next two weeks, and when Sophia agreed, he looked forward to "discussing the Universe with a bottle of brandy & cigars" with Hawthorne. A few days later Sophia notified the Melvilles that Hawthorne could not stop working on his new book for more than one day, and Melville felt moved to repeat his invitation: "Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire". Eventually Melville visited the Hawthornes again, and the next day Hawthorne surprised him by arriving at Arrowhead with his daughter Una. According to Robertson-Lorant, "The handsome Hawthorne made quite an impression on the Melville women, especially Augusta, who was a great fan of his books". They spent the day mostly "smoking and talking metaphysics".

In Robertson-Lorant's assessment of the friendship, Melville was "infatuated with Hawthorne's intellect, captivated by his artistry, and charmed by his elusive personality," and though the two writers were "drawn together in an undeniable sympathy of soul and intellect, the friendship meant something different to each of them," with Hawthorne offering Melville "the kind of intellectual stimulation he needed". They may have been "natural allies and friends," yet they were also "fifteen years apart in age and temperamentally quite different," and Hawthorne "found Melville's manic intensity exhausting at times". Melville wrote ten letters to Hawthorne, "all of them effusive, profound, deeply affectionate". Melville was inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne during the period that he was writing Moby-Dick. Melville dedicated the work to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne".

On October 18, 1851, The Whale was published in Britain in three volumes, and on November 14 Moby-Dick appeared in the United States as a single volume. In between these dates, on October 22, 1851, the Melvilles' second child, Stanwix, was born. On December 1 Hawthorne wrote a letter of appraisal to Duyckinck, prompted in part by his disagreement with the review in Literary World: "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points". In early December 1852, Melville visited the Hawthornes in Concord, and discussed the idea of the "Agatha" story which he had pitched to Hawthorne. This was the last known contact between the two writers before Melville visited Hawthorne in Liverpool four years later.

1852–1857: Unsuccessful writer

Melville had high hopes that his next book would please the public and restore his finances. In April 1851 he wrote to his British publisher, Richard Bentley, that his new book, "possessing unquestionable novelty" is "as I believe, very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it & stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new & elevated aspect of American life...." In fact, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities was heavily psychological, though drawing on the conventions of the romance, and difficult in style. It was not well received. The New York Day Book on September 8, 1852, published a venomous attack headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY". The item, offered as a news story, reported,

A critical friend, who read Melville's last book, Ambiguities, between two steamboat accidents, told us that it appeared to be composed of the ravings and reveries of a madman. We were somewhat startled at the remark, but still more at learning, a few days after, that Melville was really supposed to be deranged, and that his friends were taking measures to place him under treatment. We hope one of the earliest precautions will be to keep him stringently secluded from pen and ink.

On May 22, 1853, Elizabeth (Bessie) was born, the Melvilles' third child and first daughter, and on or about that day Herman finished work on Isle of the Cross—one relative wrote that 'The Isle of the Cross' is almost a twin sister of the little one ..." Herman traveled to New York to discuss it with his publisher, but later wrote that Harper & Brothers was "prevented" from publishing his manuscript, presumed to be Isle of the Cross, which has been lost.

Finding it difficult to find a publisher for his follow-up novel to the commercial and critical failure of Pierre, Israel Potter, the narrative of a Revolutionary War veteran, was first serialized in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1853. From November 1853 to 1856, Melville published fourteen tales and sketches in Putnam's and Harper's magazines. In December 1855 he proposed to Dix & Edwards, the new owners of Putnam's, that they publish a selection of the short fiction titled Benito Cereno and Other Sketches. The collection would eventually be named after a new introductory story Melville had written for it, "The Piazza," and was published as The Piazza Tales, with five previously published stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno". On March 2, 1855, Frances (Fanny) was born, the Melvilles' fourth child. In this period his book Israel Potter was published.

The writing of The Confidence-Man put great strain on Melville, leading Sam Shaw, a nephew of Lizzie, to write to his uncle Lemuel Shaw, "Herman I hope has had no more of those ugly attacks"—a reference to what Robertson-Lorant calls "the bouts of rheumatism and sciatica that plagued Melville". Melville's father-in-law apparently shared his daughter's "great anxiety about him" when he wrote a letter to a cousin, in which he described Melville's working habits: "When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him[self] to hard study many hours in the day, with little or no exercise, & this specially in winter for a great many days together. He probably thus overworks himself & brings on severe nervous affections". Shaw advanced Melville $1,500 from Lizzie's inheritance to travel four or five months in Europe and the Holy Land.

From October 11, 1856, to May 20, 1857, Melville made a six-month Grand Tour of the British Isles and the Mediterranean. While in England, in November he spent three days with Hawthorne, who had taken an embassy position there. At the seaside village of Southport, amid the sand dunes where they had stopped to smoke cigars, they had a conversation which Hawthorne later described in his journal:

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

Melville's subsequent visit to the Holy Land inspired his epic poem Clarel. On April 1, 1857, Melville published his last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man. This novel, subtitled His Masquerade, has won general acclaim in modern times as a complex and mysterious exploration of issues of fraud and honesty, identity and masquerade. But, when it was published, it received reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.

1857–1876: Poet

Herman Melville, 1861

To repair his faltering finances, Melville was advised by friends to enter what had proven to be, at least for others, a remunerative field: public lecturing. From late 1857 to 1860, he embarked upon three lecture tours, and spoke at lyceums, chiefly on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome. Melville's lectures, which mocked the pseudo-intellectualism of lyceum culture, were panned by contemporary audiences.

On May 30, 1860, Melville boarded the clipper Meteor for California, with his brother Thomas at the helm. After a shaky trip around Cape Horn Melville returned alone to New York via Panama in November. Turning to poetry, he submitted a collection of verse to a publisher in 1860, but it was not accepted. In 1861 he shook hands with Abraham Lincoln. In 1862, Melville met with a road accident which left him seriously injured. He also suffered from rheumatism. In 1863, he bought his brother's house at 104 East 26th Street in New York City and moved there. Allan, his brother, for his part bought Arrowhead. On March 30, his father-in-law died.

In 1864, Melville and Allan paid a visit to the Virginia battlefields of the American Civil War. After the end of the war, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), a collection of 72 poems that has been described as "a polyphonic verse journal of the conflict". It was generally ignored by reviewers, who gave him at best patronizingly favorable reviews. The volume did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later. Uneven as a collection of individual poems, "its achievement lies in the interplay of voices and moods throughout which Melville patterns a shared historical experience into formative myth".

In 1866, Melville's wife and her relatives used their influence to obtain a position for him as customs inspector for the City of New York, a humble but adequately paying appointment. He held the post for 19 years and won the reputation of being the only honest employee in a notoriously corrupt institution. Unbeknownst to him, his modest position and income "were protected throughout the periodic turmoil of political reappointments by a customs official who never spoke to Melville but admired his writings: future US president Chester A. Arthur". In 1867 his oldest son Malcolm shot himself, perhaps accidentally, and died at home at the age of 18. Some psychologists believe it was a suicide.

The job came as a relief for his family, because he would be out of the house for much of the day. Melville suffered from unpredictable mood swings, habitually "bullying his servants, wife, and children". As Robertson-Lorant's writes, "Like the tyrannical captains he had portrayed in his novels, Melville probably provoked rebellious feelings in his 'crew' by the capricious way he ruled the home, especially when he was drinking". Nervous exhaustion and physical pain rendered him short-tempered, made worse by his drinking. Robertson-Lorant takes the different ways one can look at Melville in this period to their extremes:

An unsympathetic person might characterize Melville as a failed writer who held a low-level government job, drank too much, heckled his wife unmercifully about the housework, beat her occasionally, and drove the children to distraction with his unpredictable behavior. A sympathetic observer might characterize him as an underappreciated genius, a visionary, an iconoclastic thinker, a sensitive, orphaned American idealist, and a victim of a crude, materialistic society that ate artists and visionaries alive and spat out their bones. He was both, and more.

In May 1867, Sam Shaw contacted Lizzie's minister Henry Bellows asking assistance with his "sister's case", which "has been a cause of anxiety to all of us for years past". A wife then could not leave her husband without losing all claims to the children, so Bellows suggested Lizzie be kidnapped and brought to Boston. Shaw suspected that Lizzie would not agree to such melodramatic scheme. He thought up a different scheme, in which Lizzie would visit Boston and friends would inform Herman she would not come back. To get a divorce, she would then have to bring charges against Melville, believing her husband to be insane.

Though Melville's professional writing career had ended, he remained dedicated to his writing. He bought books on poetry, landscape, art, and engraving. He had a Rembrandt mezzotint framed in his New York residence. In 1872 his brother Allan died, as did his mother, aged eighty-two. Melville devoted years to "his autumnal masterpiece," an 18,000-line epic poem titled Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage, inspired by his 1856 trip to the Holy Land. It is among the longest single poems in American literature. The title character is a young American student of divinity who travels to Jerusalem to renew his faith. One of the central characters, Rolfe, is similar to Melville in his younger days, a seeker and adventurer, while the reclusive Vine is loosely based on Hawthorne, who had died twelve years before. A bequest from his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, paid for publication in 1876, but epic-length verse-narrative was considered quite obscure even in his own time. The book had an initial printing of 350 copies, but sales failed miserably, and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to afford to buy them at cost. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut"—in other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.

1877–1891: Final years

In 1884, Mrs. Melville received a legacy, which enabled her to allow Melville a monthly sum of $25 to spend on books and prints. While Melville had his steady customs job, he no longer showed signs of depression, which recurred after the death of his second son. Melville retired on December 31, 1885, after several of his wife's relatives died and left the couple more legacies which Mrs. Melville administered with skill and good fortune. On February 22, 1886, Stanwix Melville died in San Francisco at age 36 apparently from tuberculosis after his short life which included some seafaring on the example set by his father. An article in the New York Review of Books provides a short biographical note on his son Stanwix which ends with a letter by his aunt Helen Griggs writing of his death to her cousin Catherine Lansing stating: "It is sad indeed to have had Stannie die away from home. But it seems he had a friend, who did all he could to make him comfortable, and there was money enough to procure all that was necessary for his comfort. It is sad enough; but it might have been worse, since there is so much consolation for his poor mother."

The last known image of Melville, 1885. Cabinet card by Rockwood

Elizabeth "Lizzie" Shaw Melville in 1885

In 1889 Melville became a member of the New York Society Library. As English readers, pursuing the vogue for sea stories represented by such writers as G. A. Henty, rediscovered Melville's novels in the late nineteenth century, the author had a modest revival of popularity in England, though not in the United States. He wrote a series of poems, with prose head notes, inspired by his early experiences at sea. He published them in two collections, each issued in a tiny edition of 25 copies for his relatives and friends. Of these, scholar Robert Milder calls John Marr and Other Poems (1888), "the finest of his late verse collections". The second privately printed volume is Timoleon (1891).

Intrigued by one of these poems, Melville began to rework the headnote, expanding it first as a short story and eventually as a novella. He worked on it on and off for several years, but when he died in September 1891, the piece was unfinished. Also left unpublished were another volume of poetry, Weeds and Wildings, and a sketch, "Daniel Orme". To Billy Budd, his widow added notes and edited it, but the manuscript was not discovered until 1919, by Raymond Weaver, his first biographer. He worked at transcribing and editing a full text, which he published in 1924 as Billy Budd, Sailor. It was an immediate critical success in England and soon one in the United States. The authoritative version was published in 1962, after two scholars studied the papers for several years. In 1951 it was adapted as a stage play on Broadway, and as an opera by English composer Benjamin Britten with assistance on the libretto by E. M. Forster. In 1961 Peter Ustinov released a movie based on the stage play and starring Terence Stamp titled Billy Budd (film).

Death

The gravestones of Herman Melville and his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City

New York Times obituary notice, September 29, 1891, which misspelled Melville's then-unpopular masterpiece as Mobie Dick

Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, at age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. A common story recounts that his The New York Times obituary called him "Henry Melville," implying that he was unknown and unappreciated at his time of death, but the story is not true. A later article was published on October 6 in the same paper, referring to him as "the late Hiram Melville," but this appears to have been a typesetting error.

Writing style

General narrative style

Melville's writing style shows enormous changes throughout the years as well as consistencies. In the words of Arvin, Melville's development "had been abnormally postponed, and when it came, it came with a rush and a force that had the menace of quick exhaustion in it". As early a juvenile piece as "Fragments from a Writing Desk" from 1839, scholar Sealts points out, already shows "a number of elements that anticipate Melville's later writing, especially his characteristic habit of abundant literary allusion". Typee and Omoo were documentary adventures that called for a division of the narrative in short chapters. Such compact organization bears the risk of fragmentation when applied to a lengthy work such as Mardi, but with Redburn and White Jacket, Melville turned the short chapter into an instrument of form and concentration.

A number of chapters of Moby-Dick are no longer than two pages in standard editions, and an extreme example is Chapter 122, consisting of a single paragraph of 36 words (including the thrice-repeated "Um, um, um.") The skillful handling of chapters in Moby-Dick is one of the most fully developed Melvillean signatures, and is a measure of "his manner of mastery as a writer". Individual chapters have become "a touchstone for appreciation of Melville's art and for explanation" of his themes. In contrast, the chapters in Pierre, called Books, are divided into short numbered sections, seemingly an "odd formal compromise" between Melville's natural length and his purpose to write a regular romance that called for longer chapters. As satirical elements were introduced, the chapter arrangement restores "some degree of organization and pace from the chaos". The usual chapter unit then reappears for Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man and even Clarel, but only becomes "a vital part in the whole creative achievement" again in the juxtaposition of accents and of topics in Billy Budd.

Newton Arvin points out that only superficially the books after Mardi seem as if Melville's writing went back to the vein of his first two books. In reality, his movement "was not a retrograde but a spiral one", and while Redburn and White-Jacket may lack the spontaneous, youthful charm of his first two books, they are "denser in substance, richer in feeling, tauter, more complex, more connotative in texture and imagery". The rhythm of the prose in Omoo "achieves little more than easiness; the language is almost neutral and without idiosyncrasy", yet Redburn shows a "gain in rhythmical variety and intricacy, in sharpness of diction, in syntactical resource, in painterly bravura and the fusing of image and emotion into a unity of strangeness, beauty and dread".

Melville's early works were "increasingly baroque" in style, and with Moby-Dick Melville's vocabulary had grown superabundant. Bezanson calls it an "immensely varied style". According to critic Warner Berthoff, three characteristic uses of language can be recognized. First, the exaggerated repetition of words, as in the series "pitiable," "pity," "pitied," and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin"). A second typical device is the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires"). A third characteristic is the presence of a participial modifier to emphasize and to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ..." "In this foreshadowing interval ...").

I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feegee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feegee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.

— Melville paraphrases the Bible in "The Whale as a Dish", Moby-Dick Chapter 65

After his use of hyphenated compounds in Pierre, Melville's writing gives Berthoff the impression of becoming less exploratory and less provocative in his choices of words and phrases. Instead of providing a lead "into possible meanings and openings-out of the material in hand," the vocabulary now served "to crystallize governing impressions," the diction no longer attracted attention to itself, except as an effort at exact definition. The language, Berthoff continues, reflects a "controlling intelligence, of right judgment and completed understanding". The sense of free inquiry and exploration which infused his earlier writing and accounted for its "rare force and expansiveness," tended to give way to "static enumeration". For Berthoff, added "seriousness of consideration" came at the cost of losing "pace and momentum". The verbal music and kinetic energy of Moby-Dick seem "relatively muted, even withheld" in the later works.

Melville's paragraphing in his best work Berthoff considers to be the virtuous result of "compactness of form and free assembling of unanticipated further data", such as when the mysterious sperm whale is compared with Exodus's invisibility of God's face in the final paragraph of Chapter 86 ("The Tail"). Over time Melville's paragraphs became shorter as his sentences grew longer, until he arrived at the "one-sentence paragraphing characteristic of his later prose". Berthoff points to the opening chapter of The Confidence-Man for an example, as it counts fifteen paragraphs, seven of which consist of only one elaborate sentence, and four that have only two sentences. The use of similar technique in Billy Budd contributes in large part, Berthoff says, to its "remarkable narrative economy".

Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city.

—Matthew 10:15

Style and literary allusion

In Nathalia Wright's view, Melville's sentences generally have a looseness of structure, easy to use for devices as catalogue and allusion, parallel and refrain, proverb and allegory. The length of his clauses may vary greatly, but the "torterous" writing in Pierre and The Confidence-Man is there to convey feeling, not thought. Unlike Henry James, who was an innovator of sentence ordering to render the subtlest nuances in thought, Melville made few such innovations. His domain is the mainstream of English prose, with its rhythm and simplicity influenced by the King James Bible. Another important characteristic of Melville's writing style is in its echoes and overtones. Melville's imitation of certain distinct styles is responsible for this. His three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. Scholar Nathalia Wright has identified three stylistic categories of Biblical influence. Direct quotation from any of the sources is slight; only one sixth of his Biblical allusions can be qualified as such.

First, far more unmarked than acknowledged quotations occur, some favorites even numerous times throughout his whole body of work, taking on the nature of refrains. Examples of this idiom are the injunctions to be 'as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves,' 'death on a pale horse,' 'the man of sorrows', the 'many mansions of heaven;' proverbs 'as the hairs on our heads are numbered,' 'pride goes before a fall,' 'the wages of sin is death;' adverbs and pronouns as 'verily, whoso, forasmuch as; phrases as come to pass, children's children, the fat of the land, vanity of vanities, outer darkness, the apple of his eye, Ancient of Days, the rose of Sharon.' Second, there are paraphrases of individual and combined verses. Redburn's "Thou shalt not lay stripes upon these Roman citizens" makes use of language of the Ten Commandments in Ex.20, and Pierre's inquiry of Lucy: "Loveth she me with the love past all understanding?" combines John 21:15–17 and Philippians 4:7 Third, certain Hebraisms are used, such as a succession of genitives ("all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob"), the cognate accusative ("I dreamed a dream," "Liverpool was created with the Creation"), and the parallel ("Closer home does it go than a rammer; and fighting with steel is a play without ever an interlude"). A passage from Redburn shows how all these different ways of alluding interlock and result in a fabric texture of Biblical language, though there is very little direct quotation:

The other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus' time, was found in the New; and the deep-sea land, that first struck these soundings, brought up the soil of Earth's Paradise. Not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so at God's good pleasure, and in the fulness and mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children's children, on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.

— The American melting pot described in Redburn's Biblical language, with Nathalia Wright's glosses.

In addition to this, Melville successfully imitates three Biblical strains: he sustains the apocalyptic for a whole chapter of Mardi; the prophetic strain is expressed in Moby-Dick, most notably in Father Mapple's sermon; and the tradition of the Psalms is imitated at length in The Confidence-Man.

Melville owned an edition of Shakespeare's works by 1849, and his reading of it greatly influenced the style of his next book, Moby-Dick (1851). The critic F. O. Matthiessen found that the language of Shakespeare far surpasses other influences upon the book, in that it inspired Melville to discover his own full strength. On almost every page, debts to Shakespeare can be discovered. The "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch.32) echo the famous phrase in Macbeth: "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing". Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch.36) is practically blank verse and so is Ahab's soliloquy at the beginning of "Sunset" (Ch.37):'I leave a white and turbid wake;/ Pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail./ The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm/ My track; let them; but first I pass.' Through Shakespeare, Melville infused Moby-Dick with a power of expression he had not previously possessed. Reading Shakespeare had been "a catalytic agent" for Melville, one that transformed his writing from merely reporting to "the expression of profound natural forces". The extent to which Melville assimilated Shakespeare is evident in the description of Ahab, Matthiessen continues, which ends in language that seems Shakespearean yet is no imitation: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in the plays...and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh combination". Melville's diction depended upon no source, and his prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on an awareness of "speech rhythm".

Melville's mastering of Shakespeare, Matthiessen finds, supplied him with verbal resources that enabled him to create dramatic language through three essential techniques. First, the use of verbs of action creates a sense of movement and meaning. The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast," which suggests "how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words;" Second, Melville took advantage of the Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds, as in "full-freighted". Third, Melville employed the device of making one part of speech act as another – for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or turning an adjective into a noun, as in "placeless".

Melville's style, in Nathalia Wright's analysis, seamlessly flows over into theme, because all these borrowings have an artistic purpose, which is to suggest an appearance "larger and more significant than life" for characters and themes that are in fact unremarkable. The allusions suggest that beyond the world of appearances another world exists, one that influences this world, and where ultimate truth can be found. Moreover, the ancient background thus suggested for Melville's narratives – ancient allusions being next in number to the Biblical ones – invests them with a sense of timelessness.

Critical response

Critical review during his lifetime

Melville was not financially successful as a writer, having earned just over $10,000 for his writing during his lifetime. His popularity declined dramatically after his success with travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and his stories based on misadventures in the merchant marine and navy. By 1876, all of his books were out of print. He was viewed as a minor figure in American literature in the later years of his life and during the years immediately after his death.

Melville revival and Melville studies

The "Melville Revival" of the late 1910s and 1920s brought about a reassessment of his work. The centennial of his birth was in 1919. Carl Van Doren's 1917 article on Melville in a standard history of American literature was the start of renewed appreciation. Van Doren also encouraged Raymond Weaver, who wrote the author's first full-length biography, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (1921). Discovering the unfinished manuscript of Billy Budd, among papers shown to him by Melville's granddaughter, Weaver edited it and published it in a new collected edition of Melville's works. Other works that helped fan the flames for Melville were Carl Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Carl Van Vechten's essay in The Double Dealer (1922), and Lewis Mumford's biography, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision (1929).

Herman Melville, 1860

Starting in the mid-1930s, the Yale University scholar Stanley Thomas Williams supervised more than a dozen dissertations on Melville that were eventually published as books. Where the first wave of Melville scholars focused on psychology, Williams' students were prominent in establishing Melville Studies as an academic field concerned with texts and manuscripts, tracing Melville's influences and borrowings (even plagiarism), and exploring archives and local publications. Jay Leyda, known for his work in film, spent more than a decade in archives and small-town libraries gathering documents and records for a day by day record, published as Melville Log (1951). Sparked by Leyda, the second phase of the Melville Revival emphasized research rather than accepting Melville's early books as reliable accounts.

The postwar scholars tended to think that Weaver, Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, and Mumford favored Freudian interpretations which read Melville's fiction too literally as autobiography; exaggerated his suffering in the family; and inferred a homosexual attachment to Hawthorne. They saw a different arc to Melville's writing career. The first biographers saw a tragic withdrawal after the cold critical reception for his prose works and largely dismissed his poetry. A new view emerged of Melville's turn to poetry as a conscious choice that placed him among the most important American poets.

Other post-war studies, however, continued the broad imaginative and interpretive style. Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (1947) presented Ahab as a Shakespearean tragic hero, and Newton Arvin's critical biography, Herman Melville (1950), won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1951. Hershel Parker published his two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography, in 1996 and 2002, based on extensive original research and his involvement as editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Melville edition.

Critical editions

In the 1960s, Northwestern University Press, in alliance with the Newberry Library and the Modern Language Association, organized a project to edit and published reliable critical texts of Melville's complete works, including unpublished poems, journals, and correspondence. The aim of the editors was to present a text "as close as possible to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits". The volumes have extensive appendices, including textual variants from each of the editions published in Melville's lifetime, an historical note on the publishing history and critical reception, and related documents. In many cases, it was not possible to establish a "definitive text", but the edition supplies all evidence available at the time. Because the texts were prepared with financial support from the United States Department of Education, no royalties are charged, and they have been widely reprinted.

The Melville Society

Herman Melville in 1868

In 1945, The Melville Society was founded, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the study of Melville's life and works. Between 1969 and 2003 it published 125 issues of Melville Society Extracts, which are now freely available on the society's website. Since 1999 it publishes Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, currently three issues a year, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Melville's poetry

Melville did not publish poetry until late in life, and his reputation as a poet was not high until late in the 20th century.

Melville, says recent literary critic Lawrence Buell, "is justly said to be nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson, yet his poetry remains largely unread even by many Melvillians". True, Buell concedes, even more than most Victorian poets, Melville turned to poetry as an "instrument of meditation rather than for the sake of melody or linguistic play". It is also true that he turned from fiction to poetry late in life. Yet he wrote twice as much poetry as Dickinson and probably as many lines as Whitman, and he wrote distinguished poetry for a quarter of a century, twice as long as his career publishing prose narratives. The three novels of the 1850s which Melville worked on most seriously to present his philosophical explorations, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence Man, seem to make the step to philosophical poetry a natural one rather than simply a consequence of commercial failure.

In 2000, the Melville scholar Elizabeth Renker wrote "a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient". Some critics now place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others assert that his work more strongly suggests what today would be a postmodern view. Henry Chapin wrote in an introduction to John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), a collection of Melville's late poetry, "Melville's loveable freshness of personality is everywhere in evidence, in the voice of a true poet". The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren was a leading champion of Melville as a great American poet. Warren issued a selection of Melville's poetry prefaced by an admiring critical essay. The poetry critic Helen Vendler remarked of Clarel: "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame.'"

Gender studies

Melville's writings did not attract the attention of women's studies scholars of the 1970s and 1980s, though his preference for sea-going tales that involved almost only males has been of interest to scholars in men's studies and especially gay and queer studies. Melville was remarkably open in his exploration of sexuality of all sorts. For example, Alvin Sandberg claimed that the short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers "an exploration of impotency, a portrayal of a man retreating to an all-male childhood to avoid confrontation with sexual manhood," from which the narrator engages in "congenial" digressions in heterogeneity. In line with this view, Warren Rosenberg argues the homosocial "Paradise of Bachelors" is shown to be "superficial and sterile".

David Harley Serlin observes in the second half of Melville's diptych, "The Tartarus of Maids", the narrator gives voice to the oppressed women he observes:

As other scholars have noted, the "slave" image here has two clear connotations. One describes the exploitation of the women's physical labor, and the other describes the exploitation of the women's reproductive organs. Of course, as models of women's oppression, the two are clearly intertwined.

In the end Serlin says that the narrator is never fully able to come to terms with the contrasting masculine and feminine modalities.

Issues of sexuality have been observed in other works as well. Rosenberg notes Taji, in Mardi, and the protagonist in Pierre "think they are saving young 'maidens in distress' (Yillah and Isabel) out of the purest of reasons but both are also conscious of a lurking sexual motive". When Taji kills the old priest holding Yillah captive, he says,

[R]emorse smote me hard; and like lightning I asked myself whether the death deed I had done was sprung of virtuous motive, the rescuing of a captive from thrall, or whether beneath the pretense I had engaged in this fatal affray for some other selfish purpose, the companionship of a beautiful maid.

In Pierre, the motive of the protagonist's sacrifice for Isabel is admitted: "womanly beauty and not womanly ugliness invited him to champion the right". Rosenberg argues,

This awareness of a double motive haunts both books and ultimately destroys their protagonists who would not fully acknowledge the dark underside of their idealism. The epistemological quest and the transcendental quest for love and belief are consequently sullied by the erotic.

Rosenberg says that Melville fully explores the theme of sexuality in his major epic poem, Clarel. When the narrator is separated from Ruth, with whom he has fallen in love, he is free to explore other sexual (and religious) possibilities before deciding at the end of the poem to participate in the ritualistic order represented by marriage. In the course of the poem, "he considers every form of sexual orientation – celibacy, homosexuality, hedonism, and heterosexuality – raising the same kinds of questions as when he considers Islam or Democracy".

Some passages and sections of Melville's works demonstrate his willingness to address all forms of sexuality, including the homoerotic, in his works. Commonly noted examples from Moby-Dick are the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, which is interpreted as male bonding; and the "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter, describing the camaraderie of sailors' extracting spermaceti from a dead whale. Rosenberg notes that critics say that "Ahab's pursuit of the whale, which they suggest can be associated with the feminine in its shape, mystery, and in its naturalness, represents the ultimate fusion of the epistemological and sexual quest". In addition, he notes that Billy Budd's physical attractiveness is described in quasi-feminine terms: "As the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was something analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted from the provinces and brought into competition with the highborn dames of the court".

Law and literature

Since the late 20th century, Billy Budd has become a central text in the field of legal scholarship known as law and literature. In the novel, Billy, a handsome and popular young sailor, is impressed from the merchant vessel Rights of Man to serve aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent in the late 1790s, during the war between Revolutionary France and Great Britain. He excites the enmity and hatred of the ship's master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart brings phony charges against Billy, accusing him of mutiny and other crimes, and the Captain, the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere, brings them together for an informal inquiry. At this encounter, Billy is frustrated by his stammer, which prevents him from speaking, and strikes Claggart. The blow catches Claggart squarely on the forehead and, after a gasp or two, the master-at-arms dies.

Vere immediately convenes a court-martial, at which, after serving as sole witness and as Billy's de facto counsel, Vere urges the court to convict and sentence Billy to death. The trial is recounted in chapter 21, the longest chapter in the book. It has become the focus of scholarly controversy; was Captain Vere a good man trapped by bad law, or did he deliberately distort and misrepresent the applicable law to condemn Billy to death?

Themes

As early as 1839, in the juvenile sketch "Fragments from a Writing Desk," Melville explores a problem which would reappear in the short stories "Bartleby" (1853) and "Benito Cereno" (1855): the impossibility to find common ground for mutual communication. The sketch centers on the protagonist and a mute lady, leading scholar Sealts to observe: "Melville's deep concern with expression and communication evidently began early in his career".

According to scholar Nathalia Wright, Melville's characters are all preoccupied by the same intense, superhuman and eternal quest for "the absolute amidst its relative manifestations," an enterprise central to the Melville canon: "All Melville's plots describe this pursuit, and all his themes represent the delicate and shifting relationship between its truth and its illusion". It is not clear, however, what the moral and metaphysical implications of this quest are, because Melville did not distinguish between these two aspects. Throughout his life Melville struggled with and gave shape to the same set of epistemological doubts and the metaphysical issues these doubts engendered. An obsession for the limits of knowledge led to the question of God's existence and nature, the indifference of the universe, and the problem of evil.

Legacy and honors

Plaque outside 104 East 26th street, New York

In 1982, the Library of America (LOA) began publication. In honor of Melville's central place in American culture, the very first volume contained Typee, Omoo, and Mardi. The first volumes published in 1983 and 1985 also contained Melville's work, in 1983 Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick and in 1985 Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, Tales, and Billy Budd. LOA did not publish his complete poetry until 2019.

On August 1, 1984, as part of the Literary Arts Series of stamps, the United States Postal Service issued a 20-cent commemorative stamp to honor Melville. The setting for the first day of issue was the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In 1985, the New York City Herman Melville Society gathered at 104 East 26th Street to dedicate the intersection of Park Avenue South and 26th Street as Herman Melville Square. This is the street where Melville lived from 1863 to 1891 and where, among other works, he wrote Billy Budd. Melville's house in Lansingburgh, New York, houses the Lansingburgh Historical Society. In 2010, a species of extinct giant sperm whale, Livyatan melvillei, was named in honor of Melville. The paleontologists who discovered the fossil were fans of Moby-Dick and dedicated their discovery to the author.

Selected bibliography

Main article: Herman Melville bibliography

• Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
• Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
• Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)
• Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
• White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850)
• Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)
• Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
• Isle of the Cross (1853 unpublished, and now lost)
• "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) (short story)
• The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (1854)
• "Benito Cereno" (1855)
• Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855)
• The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)
• Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) (poetry collection)
• Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) (epic poem)
• John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) (poetry collection)
• Timoleon (1891) (poetry collection)
• Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (1891 unfinished, published posthumously in 1924; authoritative edition in 1962)

Sources

• Online: Herman Melville.
• Bercaw, Mary K. (1987). Melville's Sources. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-0734-1
• Special Issue: Melville in the Marquesas. Guest Editor: Henry Hughes.
• Berthoff, Warner. (1962). The Example of Melville. Reprinted 1972, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• Bezanson, Walter E. (1986). "Moby-Dick: Document, Drama, Dream". In Bryant 1986.
• Branch, Watson G. (ed.) (1974). Melville: The Critical Heritage. Edited by Watson G. Branch. Published as paperback 1985, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 9780710077745
• Cheever, Susan. (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. ISBN 0-7862-9521-X
• Kennedy, Joyce Deveau & Frederick James (1978a). "Elizabeth and Herman". Melville Society Extracts 33, February 1978, 4–12.
• ---- (1978b). "Elizabeth and Herman (Part II)". Melville Society Extracts 34, May 1978, 3–8.
• with a new chapter. First ed. New York, 1951.
• Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Tenth Printing, 1966, New York, London and Toronto: Oxford University Press.
• Milder, Robert. (1988). "Herman Melville". Emory Elliott (General Editor), Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-05812-8
• Olsen-Smith, Steven (2015). "Introduction" and "Chronology". Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollection, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Edited by Steven Olsen-Smith. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ISBN 978-1-60938-333-6
• Sealts, Merton M., Jr. (1987). "Historical Note". Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle and others. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library. ISBN 0810105500
• --- (1988). Melville's Reading. Revised and Enlarged Edition. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0872495159
• .
• Titus, David K. (1980). "Herman Melville at the Albany Academy", Melville Society Extracts, May 1980, no. 42, pp. 1, 4–10. Retrieved December 3, 2013.
• Wright, Nathalia. (1940). "Biblical Allusion in Melville's Prose". American Literature, May 1940, 185–199.
• Wright, Nathalia. (1949). Melville's Use of the Bible. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Further reading

• Gale, Robert L. (1995). A Herman Melville Encyclopediae. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-29011-3
• Kelley, Wyn (ed.). (2006). A Companion to Herman Melville. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 9781405122313
• Lepore, Jill, "Ahab at Home: Two hundred years of Herman Melville" The New Yorker, 29 July 2019, pp. 46–51. About the life and works of Herman Melville, on the bicentennial of his birth in 1819.
• Pardes, Ilana. Melville's Bibles. University of California Press, 2008. ISBN 9780520254541
• Talley, Sharon. (2007). Student Companion to Herman Melville. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-33499-4

External links

• The Melville Society
• Melville Society Extracts, Archives 1969–2005 Online access to all 125 issues of the magazine.
• Melville Electronic Library: a critical archive Scholarly site hosted at Hofstra University: Editions, Manuscripts, Sources, Melville's Print Collection, Adaptation, biography, Criticism.
• Melville's Marginalia Online A digital archive of books that survive from Herman Melville's library with his annotations and markings.
• Melvilliana:the world and writings of Herman Melville. A scholarly blog about all things Melville.
• Arrowhead—The Home of Herman Melville
• Physical description of Melville from his 1856 passport application
• Melville's page at Literary Journal.com: research articles on Melville's works
• Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America: Collecting Herman Melville
• Guide to Herman Melville collection at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University
• Works by Herman Melville at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Herman Melville at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)