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• Born: 1 August 1819
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: 28 September 1891 (heart failure)
• Best Known As: The author of Moby-Dick

Herman Melville was the celebrated author of several big 19th-century novels about the sea. Moby-Dick (1851), the story of the fanatical Captain Ahab and his hunt for the great white whale of the title, is now considered one of the classics of American literature. Melville's other novels include Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924). Melville published little after 1860 and it wasn't until the 1900s that he gained his reputation as one of early America's great authors.

Melville had a famous friendship with author Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick... The 21st-century musician Moby is named in tribute to Melville... On film, Captain Ahab has been played by John Barrymore (1936), Gregory Peck (1956) and Patrick Stewart (1998, TV movie).

American author Herman Melville (1819-1891) is best known for his novel "Moby-Dick". His work was a response, though often in a negative or ambivalent way, to the romantic movement that dominated American literature in the mid-19th century.

Herman Melville's early autobiographical novels of adventure in the South Seas earned him a popularity that diminished as his writing turned to metaphysical themes and allegorical techniques, moving in directions that later generations would recognize as existentialism, Freudian psychologizing, and blackly comic satire. He had some success with his magazine sketches and short stories, but his poetry, a main concern during the latter part of his life, was ignored. Largely forgotten at the time of his death, he was rediscovered with the shift in taste that followed World War I. His reputation continues to grow, and Moby-Dick has become a world classic.

Melville was born in New York City on Aug. 1, 1819. His father, a merchant and importer, belonged to a well-connected Boston family; he died bankrupt in 1832, survived by his wife and eight children. Melville's mother was of New York Dutch ancestry. Melville's family background included Revolutionary War heroes, Dutch patricians, Calvinists, and upper-middle-class New Englanders, but his boyhood was spent in genteel poverty.

Melville's studies at the Albany Academy terminated with his father's death. Thereafter, he was largely self-educated and for a while something of a drifter (like Ishmael in Moby-Dick, who asserted that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard"). He tried various occupations - bank clerk, clerk in the family business, country schoolmaster - and he studied surveying before becoming a sailor.

At 18 Melville made his first voyage as a crew member on a New York-Liverpool packet ship. At 22 he shipped on the whaler Acushnet. Returning four years later, he almost immediately began writing novels derived from his adventures. At this time Polynesia was a romantic and little-known region. Furthermore, maritime affairs were a matter of public interest. Also, there was a market for authentic personal narratives as opposed to fictional "romances."

Three Novels of the South Seas

Typee (1846) grew out of Melville's accidental sojourn with the presumably cannibalistic natives of the Marquesas Islands. It found a receptive audience and admitted Melville into the New York literary circles. A successful sequel, Omoo (1847), which paralleled Melville's experiences as a beachcomber in Tahiti, encouraged his belief that he could support himself through his writing. He married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts and a family friend, in 1847.

Melville's final novel of the South Seas, Mardi (1849), marks a transition. It begins realistically aboard a whaler but ends in the realm of fantasy, rhapsody, and allegory. Critics have found in it reflections of his courtship and marriage and of his first reading of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, and other authors of "old books."

Melville's novels of the South Seas progress from realism toward romance, from simplicity toward complexity, and from relatively modest ambitions toward serious pretensions. Typee follows the outline of actual events closely. In July 1842, with a shipmate, Toby Greene, Melville had deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands. They planned to seek refuge among the hospitable natives of the Happar Valley but by mistake entered the Valley of the Typees, who were reputed to be cannibals. Here they lived almost idyllically. Melville, however, had injured his leg, and the Typees permitted Greene to leave to obtain medical assistance. Alone, Melville became bored by his vegetative existence and grew increasingly fearful that the friendly Typees might be cannibals after all. Greene did not return, but an Australian whaling bark effected Melville's rescue.

The narrative of Typee is straightforward, though Melville capitalizes on suspenseful elements in the experience. A careful observer and colorful reporter, he fleshed out his account (or jogged his memory) by using other works in the field, and he introduced some fictional material. There are elements of satire and social criticism in Typee, as well as symbolism and a preliminary grappling with philosophical questions that would become primary in his later writings. In addition to being an exotic travel yarn about a tropical Eden, Typee can be read as a study in false appearances and misguided quests.

Omoo, which takes its name from the Marquesan word for vagabond, is a loose, episodic description of Melville's wanderings in Tahiti and further experiences aboard whalers. It is in a lighthearted vein, though it hits hard at missionary despoilers of the Pacific paradise and other civilizing forces that Melville saw as superficial, exploitative, and destructive. Starting where Typee leaves off, it repeats the pattern of dissatisfaction on shipboard, of a desertion that represents a symbolic attempt to escape civilization, of picaresque adventures, and of rejection of Rousseauistic primitivism suggested by shipping on yet another whaler.

At this point Mardi, the transitional novel in the South Seas trilogy, begins. The established progression of disaffection on shipboard, desertion with a congenial companion, and adventure on the high seas recurs. But this time the realistic narrative, which is implicitly a quest, shifts overtly to an extravagant search for an elusive, symbolic maiden on allegorical islands beyond the horizon of Polynesia.

The maiden is never found, though she is pursued with a monomaniacal, self-destructive relentlessness. Sandwiched into this account are undigested philosophical speculations, dreamy poetizing, and keen satiric thrusts aimed at such topical targets as slavery, the revolutions of 1848, and popular theological and scientific theories. Melville, whose veracity was doubted in his realistic narratives, was deliberately, almost defiantly, writing fiction, embarking on adventures of the mind that were the counterparts of his actual exploits. The book did not succeed, and Melville returned to less farfetched subject matter in Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), which had modest financial rewards.

Other Early Works

Melville disparaged Redburn as a "little nursery tale." Its source was his Liverpool voyage in 1839. It is an initiation story - the tale of a green youth of genteel pretensions transformed by raw experience into a competent sailor and a self-reliant man with a sense of his own (and mankind's) limitations. Redburn has a social dimension: the descriptions of the hideous poverty of Liverpool slums and the crowded conditions of emigrants in steerage that led to epidemics.

Melville regarded White-Jacket, subtitled The World in a Man-of-War, more highly. The fictional frigate Neversink, naval slang for any hypothetical ship, is a microcosm of Melville's native land in particular and the world in general. He methodically described the naval hierarchy from commodore and captain down to the lowest sailor, emphasizing the irony of an authoritarian system as an instrument of American democracy.

The narrative line follows Melville's own homeward-bound cruise on the frigate United States in 1843-1844, but he included events not recorded in the log of this ship. For example, the narrator is issued a white duck jacket unlike the uniform jackets of the other sailors. He is pleased to be distinguished from the rest of the crew until he discovers that such distinction has severe drawbacks. He tries to divest himself of the jacket, but succeeds only when he falls into the sea and has to cut his way out of it to keep from drowning.

White-Jacket is a reform novel, advocating the abolition of flogging in the U.S. Navy and other measures to improve the lot of American seamen. Although it is more simply constructed, is generally optimistic in tone, and contains a considerable amount of direct narrative, description, and reform polemics, it foreshadows Melville's complex masterpiece, Moby-Dick (1851), which it immediately precedes.

Moby-Dick

In 1851 Melville wrote that he was well along with "a strange sort of book" on whaling, adding "I mean to give the truth of the thing…." The narrator of Moby-Dick, Ishmael, is another drifter. Ishmael ships on the Pequod, commanded by the demon-ridden Captain Ahab, whose overweening purpose is to capture the albino whale Moby-Dick, which had severed his leg. Ahab bends his polyglot crew to this purpose. Ishmael is caught up in "fiery pursuit," until, through his fraternal relationship with a Polynesian harpooner, he achieves a balanced view. He alone escapes when Moby-Dick attacks and destroys the Pequod.

The book's rich texture lends itself to various interpretations. It can be read superficially as a melodramatic adventure or for the precise descriptions of the technology of whaling and the natural history of whales interspersed in the narrative. Yet virtually every detail of the book - plot line, accounts of the capture of whales and the processing of blubber, seamen's legends and lore, natural history, characterization, and descriptions of nautical gear - is a vehicle for a deliberately inconclusive, many-sided debate on the nature of the human condition.

One of Melville's favorite devices is to argue a point effectively in one chapter, undercut it with an equally effective and opposite argument in the next, then to present other arguments at various points between. A related technique is his use of traditional systems for ordering knowledge - ostensibly to clarify, present information, or advance an argument - but actually as a means of demonstrating the limitations of the system and, by extension, the impossibility of mere earthly beings coming up with categorical answers to any question whatsoever. Ishmael's ability to exist within this limitation makes possible his salvation. Ahab's inability to do so destroys him.

The writings that follow Moby-Dick are rich in nautical themes and allusions and also contain autobiographical matter, but Melville moved on to other forms and settings. In Pierre (1852) the American countryside and the American city are placed in opposition. Pierre, scion of rural gentry, is an idealistic young man whose efforts to apply Christian solutions to the problems of an imperfect world result in death and disaster. In this dark, uneven book, the subtle examination of ethical questions and deep probing into the human psyche are compelling.

Moby-Dick was not popular, though Melville had the satisfaction of knowing that it was understood and appreciated by a few discerning readers. Pierre did not yield even this satisfaction. So once more Melville made a special effort to recoup. He turned to the magazines, producing tales, sketches, and short novels, many of great distinction.

Magazine Writings

The best of the magazine writing includes Israel Potter (1855), which first appeared serially in Putnam's Magazine, and The Piazza Tales (1856). Israel Potter is the story of a young New Englander who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, served under John Paul Jones, was a courier for Benjamin Franklin in Europe, and then, as a result of a series of mishaps, lived in exile in the London slums until he could make his way home 50 years later. Melville's source, he wrote, was "Israel Potter's autobiographical story," published in a crude pamphlet. Melville made it into a book of modest dimensions compared with Moby-Dick or Pierre, and it records human hardihood in the face of high risks and wearing, undramatic misfortunes.

The Piazza Tales is introduced by an essay, "The Piazza," which delicately examines the view from the piazza of Melville's Pittsfield, Mass., farmhouse, his home from 1850 to 1863. The vista across a valley and beyond to the Berkshire Mountains is enchanting, but its charm fades upon close scrutiny. The narrator admits the need to dispel illusion but makes an exception of a lonely country girl who needs illusion in order to survive.

Two other tales, "Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas," are also concerned with appearances and realities. "Benito Cereno," the undisguised retelling of autobiography, is a Gothic suspense story. A cargo of slaves seizes a Spanish ship and forces the captain to serve them in their attempt to return to Africa. The obvious distress of the ship attracts the attention of an American vessel whose commander tries to help, to discover the real nature of the situation, and to seek out and then draw back from the underlying complexities of the events that unfold around him.

"The Encantadas" is a series of sketches about the Galapagos, or "Enchanted," Islands - barren, volcanic inversions of the paradisiacal isles described in Typee and Omoo. They, too, are under a spell that clouds their true nature. A third notable story is "Bartleby," an existentialist parable about a lawyer's scribe who "prefers not to" act in a world where even worthy action seems fruitless and pointless and where suffering in ignorance is the common bond of humanity.

The Confidence-Man

The grimly comic underside of Melville dominates The Confidence-Man (1857), the last work of prose he published in his lifetime. Set on a riverboat going down the Mississippi on April Fool's Day, it consists of a series of encounters between confidence men (or perhaps a single confidence man in various disguises) and their marks. The encounters are almost ritualistic variations on a theme. The Christian watchwords of faith, hope, and charity become part of the spiel of the con men, who victimize fools, rogues, and virtuous weaklings alike.

The Confidence-Man draws heavily on American "types" and is packed with topical allusions that are now often obscure. Its ambience is the expansive, optimistic, materialistic America of the 1850s, to which Melville voiced corrosive dissent. An early, successful essay in black comedy, it was a commercial failure.

Last Years

At this point Melville withdrew from the literary marketplace. With half of his life still before him, he chose to write for his own satisfaction and that of the few kindred spirits. He had published 10 books in 11 years and additional uncollected tales and reviews, including an important review of Mosses from an Old Manse by his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne (1846), and he had strained himself physically and emotionally. In 1856, fearing a serious breakdown, his family arranged for him to tour Europe and the Holy Land.

Melville's pilgrimage to sacred places did little to settle the religious questions that continued to rack him, but he was exhilarated by the symmetry of Greek architecture and sculpture and by the paintings he saw in Italy and England. He returned renewed in spirit, though his financial affairs were not in good order. Efforts to improve this situation by obtaining a government position came to nothing.

Meanwhile, for two seasons Melville lectured on his travels and art theories, and with more success, on his adventures among the South Sea islands. He also began writing the verse that was his literary focus for the next 30 years. Attempts to publish his poetry failed until, "in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond," he wrote Battle-Pieces (1866), a verse cycle that depicts many aspects and both sides of the Civil War, beginning with a prologue on the hanging of John Brown and concluding with an essay that pleads for magnanimity and patience. It was not well received.

That same year Melville was appointed an inspector in the New York Customhouse. Thereafter he lived quietly, absorbed in the routine of his employment, poetry, and family life. Clarel (1876), a long narrative poem, is about a group of pilgrims visiting shrines and historical sites in the Holy Land. In general, Melville was more at peace with himself, though he suffered personal tragedies in the suicide of his 18-year-old son and the premature death of his other son. Legacies eased his living situation; he could afford to buy books and prints and to publish his poetry privately.

Melville retired from the customhouse in 1885. Sometime in 1888 he began work on Billy Budd, a short novel about an innocent sailor who is sacrificed for the sake of maintaining order and efficiency aboard his warship. Like most of his writing, it raises more questions than it settles, but it ends on a note of relaxation if not serenity. Melville marked the manuscript "End of Book April 19th 1891," an indication that the story was nearing completion but still unfinished. Yet Melville never felt that any of his work was truly finished. He had written in Moby-Dick: "God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but a draught of a draught."

Melville died in New York City on Sept. 28, 1891. The manuscript of Billy Budd was not published until 1924.

Further Reading

Melville's fiction is available in numerous editions. He has attracted so much critical attention, it is almost impossible to describe all of the available writings about him. Moreover, his works lend themselves to the application of analytic systems that have appeared since his death; thus there are provocative interpretations deriving from later psychological, historical, and sociological theories.

Stanley T. Williams surveys Melville scholarship with balance and concision in Eight American Authors, edited by Floyd Stovall (1956; rev. 1972). Annual surveys began with the publication of American Literary Scholarship (1965) for 1963, issued each year thereafter under the auspices of the Modern Language Association.

A most useful biography is Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (1951). Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville (2 vols., 1951; repr. with additional material, 1969), provides the raw material arranged in chronological order and constitutes a biographical record. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (1950), has critical and psychological insights. Charles Roberts Anderson, Melville and the South Seas (1939), first established the facts behind Melville's early fiction and is still basic.

A pioneer monograph that remains important is Howard Vincent, The Trying-out of Moby-Dick (1949). Important commentaries include William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (1944); Ronald Mason, The Spirit above the Dust (1951); Merlin Bowen, The Long Encounter: Self andExperience in the Writings of Herman Melville (1960); and Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (1962). F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), is a matchless examination of the cultural milieu, with four chapters on Melville's art and thought.

For more information on Herman Melville, visit Britannica.com.

(1819-1891), author. Although Melville has been regarded throughout most of the twentieth century as one of America's most powerful literary artists, particularly for his masterpiece Moby-Dick, he was largely unrecognized in his lifetime.

Born into a once-prominent family, Melville enlisted as a sailor on the whaler Acushnet in 1841. His experiences supplied him with raw materials for the sea narratives he later wrote. After four years at sea, Melville settled in New York and became associated with a group of editors and journalists seeking to foster a "home" literature. With the backing of editor Evert Duyckinck, Melville published his semiautobiographical sea adventure Typee in 1846, followed in 1847 by its sequel Omoo.

His critical reception was as favorable as it would ever be. But even in these first reviews, critics condemned not only his enticing descriptions of Polynesian life and his attacks on American missionaries in the Pacific but less predictably, what they called his lack of "veracity"--a disinclination for realistic representation that suggested to some an intent to mislead his readers. Despite what he knew of his readership's intolerance for "flights of fancy," Melville then published a political allegory, Mardi, in 1849. Its lack of critical success led him to write the sea adventures Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), works he disdainfully referred to as ""jobs," which I have done for money-- being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood."

With these novels, Melville's practical impulse was spent. Determined to convey a "Truth" for which his readership had no use, Melville, in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, exuberantly described Moby-Dick (1851) as "a wicked book" that yet made him "feel spotless as the lamb." Although Melville's contemporaries found the novel frustratingly opaque, the tale of the tormented Captain Ahab, who unites his racially, ethnically, and nationally diverse crew in an apocalyptic quest for the white whale, has been valued by modern readers for its stylistic innovativeness and for the range of metaphysical, political, and cultural issues it addresses.

Moby-Dick was followed in 1852 by Pierre, a work on which Melville's reputation foundered. Pierre explored the plight of the aspiring American author caught in the maelstrom of competing definitions of the writer's role in relation to a culture anxious to discern in the new "democratic" literature a faithful--and flattering-- self-portrait. The Piazza Tales (1853-1856), a collection of masterful short stories, and the short novel Israel Potter (1855), received scant critical notice. The Confidence Man (1857) was the last of his novels to be published while he was alive.

Melville then turned to poetry. His excellent Civil War poetry was published in 1866, although little critical notice was (or has been) taken of it. A poetic meditation on his visit to the Holy Land, Clarel, was published with family money in the centennial year, 1876. Melville apparently reworked two privately printed volumes of poetry, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891), into his uncompleted novel, Billy Budd, discovered in manuscript in 1924.

Melville's writings are so encyclopedic in subject matter and so far-ranging in their generic and stylistic experimentation that they have inspired a multitude of literary and historical theses on the preoccupations of antebellum America, from the theological crises of the post-Calvinist era to the political and cultural crises of American expansionism and slavery.

Bibliography:

Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Politics of Individualism (1989); Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1983).

Author:

Nancy Ruttenburg

See also Literature.

1819–91, American author, b. New York City, considered one of the great American writers and a major figure in world literature.

Early Life and Works

Born into an impoverished family of distinguished Dutch and English colonial descent, Melville was 12 when his father died. He left school at 15, worked at a variety of jobs, and in 1839 signed on as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool, an experience reflected in his romance Redburn. In 1841–42 he spent 18 months on a whaler, but intolerable hardships on board caused him and a companion to escape from the ship at the Marquesas Islands. The two were captured by a tribe of cannibals, by whom they were well treated. After being rescued by an Australian whaler, Melville spent some time in Tahiti and other Pacific islands before shipping home in 1844.

The immediate results of his experiences were Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), as well as Redburn (1849), all fresh, exuberant, and immensely popular romances. In 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts. The popularity of his books brought him prosperity, business trips to Europe, and admission to literary circles in New York City. In 1850 he bought a farm near Pittsfield, Mass., and became friends with his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne. The allegorical implications evident in his romances Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849) and White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850) reached full development in Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851).

Moby-Dick

The story of a deranged whaling captain's obsessive voyage to find and destroy the great white whale that had ripped off his leg, the novel is at once an exciting sea story, a sociological critique of various American class and racial prejudices, a repository of information about whales and whaling, and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of good and evil, of man and his fate. The novel is heavily symbolic, and many critical formulations have been made as to the meaning of its central symbol, the great white whale Moby-Dick himself. Moby-Dick is greatly enhanced by Melville's rhythmic, rhetorical prose style. Although it is now considered one of the greatest of all novels, Moby-Dick was misunderstood and ill-received in its time. Readers were confused by the book's symbolism, and they failed to grasp Melville's complex view of the world.

Later Works and Life

Like Moby-Dick, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), a psychological study of guilt and frustrated good, was disregarded by the public. Disheartened by debts, ill health, and the failure to win an audience, Melville became absorbed in mysticism. He was unable to accept the optimism of transcendentalism, for he was always able to see the cruel as well as the beautiful in nature. Although he searched for a faith that would satisfy his yearning for the Absolute, he never found one. Melville continued to produce important works in The Piazza Tales (1856), a collection which includes “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” and The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857), a pessimistic satire on materialism.

Melville was forced to sell his farm, and in 1866 he secured a poorly paying position in New York City as a district inspector of customs, a job he held for 19 years. His late works include the volumes of poetry Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and the long poem Clarel (1876). However, he wrote no more fiction until his last years when he composed the posthumously published novella Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924), the tragedy of an innocent. Melville died in poverty and obscurity. Although neglected for many years, he was rediscovered around 1920 and has been enthusiastically studied by critics and scholars ever since. Many of his unpublished works were issued posthumously, notably The Apple Tree Table (1922), a collection of magazine sketches; Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent (1948); and Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant (1955).

Bibliography

See the authoritative ed. of his writings (15 vol., ed. by H. M. Hayford et al., 1968–93); his letters (ed. by M. R. Davis and W. H. Gilman, 1960); biographies by N. Arvin (1950, repr. 1972, 2002), L. Howard (1981), G. Wolff (1987), H. Parker (2 vol., 1996–2002), L. Robertson-Lorant (1996), E. Hardwick (2000), and A. Delbanco (2005); studies by M. Rogin (1983), N. Tolchin (1988), and W. Dimock (1989).

(1819-1891)

1846	Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. A fictionalized account of the author's experiences as a whaleman who jumps ship from the Acushnet and is confined by the cannibalistic Typee tribe in the Marquesas Islands. First published in England, it had received warm reviews there, but its U.S. publishers, Wiley and Putnam, made Melville cut thirty pages that disparaged Christian missionaries. The book creates a sensation, and many of Melville's contemporaries, including Margaret Fuller, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, praise it. Others find the depiction of primitive culture vulgar. The book would sell more than twenty thousand copies during Melville's life.
1847	Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. This sequel to Typee is a fictionalized account of Melville's adventures in Tahiti, which, after the success of Typee, publishers were eager to print and readers quick to purchase. The work includes a severe attack on missionaries and French colonials in Polynesia and a great degree of sexuality, which again wins an audience but also results in negative reviews. The American Whig declares that Melville is "a man glorifying in his licentiousness."
1849	Mardi: And a Voyage Thither. A romantic and satirical novel that introduces Melville's first questioning protagonist, a seaman who is dissatisfied with his life, deserts his ship, and encounters metaphysical, ethical, and political questions. The book signifies the beginning of Melville's emphasis on psychology and metaphysics and more allegorical, symbolic method. Mellville also publishes Redburn, which he considers a "potboiler" and a way to please audiences after their displeasure with Mardi. It is based on his first sea voyage, in which the naive protagonist is thrown into the world of Liverpool, learns about the harsh realities of life, and eventually matures.
1850	White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. This semi-autobiographical account of Melville's travels from Hawaii to the Atlantic coast with the U.S. Navy includes scenes of flogging, which would be used as propaganda to stop the custom. The work is also noteworthy for its use of symbols, especially the white jacket, which the narrator breaks free of, thus losing his innocence.
1850	"Hawthorne and His Mosses." Melville's review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) acknowledges the writer as the "American Shakespeare." While reading the work, Melville had recognized Hawthorne as a kindred spirit, and the younger writer would pursue an acquaintance with Hawthorne that became one of the most significant American literary friendships.
1851	Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Melville's masterpiece converts an account of a whaling voyage into a symbolic existential drama framed by the monomaniacal Captain Ahab's pursuit of a white whale. Described by one reviewer as a "salamagundi of fact, fiction, and philosophy," contemporaries are mainly baffled by the book's techniques and intentions, and its failure to find an appreciative audience embittered Melville. In the twentieth century the novel would be rediscovered and acknowledged as possibly the greatest of all American novels.
1852	Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. The complicated life story of Pierre Glendinning, the son of a prominent Revolutionary family, as he grows from the security of his youth to the uncertainty of adulthood, the result of a letter from a woman claiming she is his illegitimate half-sister. The work is harshly criticized, and many continue to consider it poor, but it did win favor with some critics after Melville's rediscovery in the twentieth century.
1853	"Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street." Now considered one of the best American short stories, it is first published anonymously in Putnam's, receives acclaim, and would be later collected in The Piazza Tales (1856). The story concerns a Wall Street lawyer who is unable to fire his copyist, who objects to things with the repeated refrain "I would prefer not to." Some suggest the story is an allegory of Melville's own feelings in response to the reception of his novels.
1854	"The Encantadas; or, The Enchanted Isles." First published in Putnam's Monthly under the pseudonym "Salvator R. Tarnmoor," this collection of ten allegorical sketches of the Galapagos Islands, where Melville had traveled in 1841, would be included in The Piazza Tales (1856).
1855	Israel Potter: His Fifty Years in Exile. Melville's only serialized novel is a historical narrative of a Revolutionary War hero who is captured by the British and lives in exile in England for fifty years, during which he encounters King George III, Benjamin Franklin, and John Paul Jones. The adventurous novel is Melville's attempt to satisfy his displeased readership, though he maintains his criticisms of American politics and philosophies.
1856	The Piazza Tales. A collection of Melville's finest short stories, which had been previously published in Putnam's after the commercial failure of his later novels. "The Piazza," a previously unpublished story, describes Arrowhead, Melville's farmhouse near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and serves as an introduction to the collection, underscoring the repeated theme in the works in the difference between appearance and reality. The stories are "Bartleby the Scrivener," "The Encantadas," "The Lightning-Rod Man," "The Bell-Tower," and "Benito Cereno," about an innocent American sea captain who believes that the San Dominick is a slave ship under the command of captain Benito Cereno, when it is actually under the control of the slaves who have murdered most of the crew. Robert Lowell would adapt the story as a one-act verse play in The Old Glory (1965).
1857	The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. A narrative following a series of con men, or possibly one confidence man in a number of disguises, on board a Mississippi River steamboat on April Fool's Day. The bitterly satiric novel examines the nature of trust and faith in America. Melville's final prose fiction work published during his lifetime, it is a dismal failure.
1866	Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Melville's collection of Civil War poems begins with "The Portent," a verse on the death of John Brown, and continues with reflections on most of the significant events of the war, arranged chronologically and finishing with "A Meditation," an elegy to the fallen on both sides. Sales and reviews are poor, but Melville publishes a supplement arguing for Northern benevolence toward the struggling South, which wins the work some favor. Not until the twentieth century would the collection truly gain respect as the only Civil War verses comparable in artistry to Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps.
1876	Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage. Derived from the author's voyage to the Middle East from 1856 to 1857, Melville's philosophical narrative poem treats a young scholar's search for religious awakening while visiting Holy Land sites and carrying on debates with fellow pilgrims. The book is largely ignored, selling only 478 copies.
1888	John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea-Pieces. Melville's collection of sea poems and prose sketches features a section of monologues by mariners, two longer poems concerning tragedies at sea--"The Haglets" and "The Aeolian Harp," and shorter sea lyrics. Privately printed in a limited edition of twenty-five copies, it is distributed to Melville's friends and relatives.
1891	Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse. The last of Melville's books to appear during his lifetime is privately printed in an edition of twenty-five and consists of poetic meditations on philosophy, history, art, and his own past, as well as poems reflecting his travels to the Mediterranean and the Middle East in 1856-1857.
1924	Billy Budd. Completed during his last five years, Melville's moral allegory pits the handsome and innocent seaman Billy Budd against the malevolent master-at-arms Claggart. When Billy strikes his superior officer, Captain Vere is forced to choose between his duty and his personal sense of Billy's innocence. Melville's last published masterpiece sparks a critical debate over whether the work should be regarded as a bitter depiction of the destruction of virtue or Melville's final acceptance of a Christian consolation.

Quotes:

"Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death."

"He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great."

"Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

"There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man."

"In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods."

"Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity."

See more famous quotes by Herman Melville