Everything about Herman Melville totally explained
Herman Melville (
August 1 1819 –
September 28 1891) was an
American novelist,
short story writer,
essayist and
poet. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, and his popularity declined precipitously after only a few years. By the time of his death he'd been almost completely forgotten, but his longest novel,
Moby-Dick — largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and most responsible for Melville's fall from favor with the reading public — was recognized in the 20th century as one of the chief literary masterpieces of both American and world literature.
Life
Herman Melville was born in
New York City on
August 1,
1819, as the third child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. (After Allan died, Maria added an "e" to the surname.) Part of a well-established - if colorful - Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad doing business deals as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville, an honored survivor of the
Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in
Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need. The maternal side of Melville's family was Hudson Valley Dutch. His maternal grandfather was General
Peter Gansevoort, a hero of the battle of Saratoga; in his gold-laced uniform, the general sat for a portrait painted by
Gilbert Stuart. The portrait appeared in Melville's later novel,
, for Melville wrote out of his familial as well as his nautical background. Like the titular character in
Pierre, Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."
Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to
Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. The new venture ended in disastrous failure, and in 1832 Allan Melvill died of a sudden illness that included mental collapse, leaving his family in poverty. Although Maria had well-off kin, they were concerned with protecting their own inheritances and taking advantage of investment opportunities rather than settling their mother's estate so Maria's family would be more secure.
Herman Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a
cabin boy on a New York ship bound for
Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship.
Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.
The succeeding three years (1837 to 1840) (voyage to Liverpool was 1839) were mostly occupied with school-teaching. Near the end of 1840 he once again decided to sign
ship's articles; on New Year's Day, 1841, he sailed from
Fairhaven, Massachusetts on the whaler
Acushnet, which was bound for the Pacific Ocean. The vessel sailed around
Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. Melville left very little direct information about the events of this 18 months' cruise, although his whaling romance,
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, probably gives many pictures of life on board the
Acushnet. Melville deserted the Acushnet in the
Marquesas Islands, and for three weeks lived among the Typee natives, who were called
cannibals by the two other tribal groups on the island but treated him very well. His book
Typee describes a brief love affair with a beautiful native girl, Fayaway, who generally "wore the garb of Eden" and came to epitomize the guileless
noble savage in the popular imagination, but we've no evidence of Melville's actual activities among the islanders.
Melville didn't seem to be concerned about repercussions from his desertion of the
Acushnet. He boarded another whaler bound for Hawaii and left that ship in Honolulu. After working as a clerk for four months he joined the crew of the
frigate USS United States, which reached
Boston in October of 1844. These experiences were described in
Typee,
Omoo, and
White Jacket, which were published as novels mainly because few believed their veracity.
Typee was published in 1846 in London after being rejected by a Boston publisher; it became an overnight bestseller in London. The Boston publisher subsequently accepted
Omoo sight unseen.
Typee and
Omoo gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer, although the novels didn't generate enough royalties for him to live on.
Omoo wasn't as colorful as
Typee, and readers began to realize Melville wasn't just producing adventure stories.
Redburn and
White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers.
Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.
Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of noted Massachusetts jurist
Lemuel Shaw) on August 4, 1847. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. In 1850 they purchased
Arrowhead, a farm house in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts that's today a museum. Here Melville remained for thirteen years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm. There he befriended the author
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby
Lenox. Melville, something of an intellectual loner for most of his life, was tremendously inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne during the very period that he was writing one of the greatest works in the English language,
Moby-Dick (dedicating it to Hawthorne It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote
Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo,, The Confidence-Man and many short stories and works of various
genres.
Melville is less well known as a
poet and didn't publish poetry until late in life. After the
Civil War, he published
Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which didn't sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later. But again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative
Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the
Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. This may be the longest single poem in American literature. The poem, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic
Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the
New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut". In other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.
His poetry isn't as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first
modernist poet in the United States; others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view.
Clarel has won the admiration of no less a critic than
Helen Vendler, who read it in preparation for the 1976 Pittsfield Centennial Celebration.
The Melville Revival
After the success of
travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on misadventures in the merchant marine and navy, Melville's popularity declined dramatically. In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature.
However, a confluence of publishing events in the 1920s brought about a reassessment now commonly called the Melville Revival. The two books generally considered most important to the Revival were both brought forth by Raymond Weaver: his 1921 biography
Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic and his 1924 version of Melville's last great but never quite finished or properly organized work,
Billy Budd, which Melville's granddaughter gave to Weaver when he visited her for research on the biography. The other works that helped fan the Revival flames were
Carl Van Doren's
The American Novel (1921),
D. H. Lawrence's
Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and
Lewis Mumford's biography,
Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Work (1929).
Additionally, over the past 50 years there has been an emerging interest concerning a perceived homo-erotic sub-text of Melville's writings. Homoerotic overtones have been found in the early seafaring novels, from extended descriptions of the male beauty of the South Sea islanders to romanticised depictions of sailor friends, and comrades on board ship. In
Moby Dick,
male bonding has been found in the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, as well as in the metaphoric "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter describing the camaraderie of sailors extracting spermaceti from a dead whale.
Billy Budd, written at the very end of Melville's life, is considered both the most explicit and somber of his writings in terms of gay content. Billy, innocent and handsome, is destroyed by the evil and sexually repressed master-at-arms Claggert in a harsh and unforgiving world far removed from the simpler, idyllic paradise, described in the earlier South Sea novels.
Bibliography
Novels
Short stories
The Piazza Tales (1856)
Uncollected
Unpublished in Melville's lifetime
Poetry
Books
Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866)
Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876)
John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) Online edition
Timoleon (1891) Online edition
Weeds and Wildings, and a Rose or Two (1924)
Uncollected or unpublished poems
"Epistle to Daniel Shepherd"
"Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh" [sic]
"The Admiral of the White"
"To Tom"
"Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-temple in Arcadia"
"Puzzlement"
"The Continents"
"The Dust-Layers"
"A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855"
"A Reasonable Constitution"
"Rammon"
"A Ditty of Aristippus"
"In a Nutshell"
"Adieu"
Essays (all uncollected during Melville's lifetime)
"Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 1" (Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, May 4, 1839)
"Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 2" (Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, May 18, 1839)
"Etchings of a Whaling Cruise" (New York Literary World, March 6, 1847)
"Authentic Anecdotes of 'Old Zack'" (Yankee Doodle, II, weekly [September4 excepted] from July 24 to September 11, 1847)
"Mr Parkman's Tour" (New York Literary World, March 31, 1849)
"Cooper's New Novel" (New York Literary World, April 28, 1849)
"A Thought on Book-Binding" (New York Literary World, March 16, 1850)
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (New York Literary World, August 17 and August 24, 1850)
Other
Correspondence, Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston, IL and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library (1993). ISBN 0-8101-0995-6
Journals, Ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth. Evanston, IL and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Pr. and The Newberry Library (1989). ISBN 0-8101-0823-2Further Information
Get more info on 'Herman Melville'.
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