Moby-Dick took eighteen months yet found no audience
Herman Melville (1819–1891), born Melvill, wrote Moby-Dick (1851), Typee, and Billy Budd in the American Renaissance. A merchant father’s 1832 death pushed him to sea as a common sailor in 1839. Moby-Dick’s year-and-a-half labour met scorn; he turned toward poetry such as Battle-Pieces (1866).
Born in New York City on 1 August 1819, the third of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill’s eight children, he took pride in two grandfathers who fought in the Revolution, one of them a Boston Tea Party raider. The 1820s were comfortable, but by 1830 his father owed both families more than $20,000 and moved them to Albany to try the fur trade. In December 1831 Allan rode the last 70 miles home in an open carriage through freezing nights, grew delirious and died on 28 January 1832; the boy, out of school by then, probably watched the decline, and an uncle found him a bank clerk’s job at $150 a year.
He shipped out in 1839 on the merchant ship St. Lawrence and in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, then deserted in the Marquesas. Typee and its sequel Omoo turned those adventures into bestsellers and let him marry Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Boston judge Lemuel Shaw, but Mardi, his first invented story, flopped.
Moby-Dick found few readers, and critics savaged Pierre the next year. Magazine stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno followed, and The Confidence-Man in 1857 was his last prose book in his lifetime. From 1863 he lived in New York, eventually working as a customs inspector.
Poetry took over, from the Civil War verses of Battle-Pieces to the long Holy Land poem Clarel in 1876. Private grief ran deep: his son Malcolm died of a self-inflicted gunshot in 1867 and Stanwix of apparent tuberculosis in 1886. Largely forgotten when he died, he was revived around his 1919 centenary, Billy Budd appeared in 1924, and Moby-Dick now counts among the Great American Novels.
Source: Herman Melville
