Herman Melville

Your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram--lecherous dog,...

The society into which Herman Melville was born was in the fullest sense of the word a provincial one. His heritage and his work united him with that society; and when its occup...

In 1840, Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. It was an account of a long voyage around the Horn, and various experiences in the Spanish settlements of Califo...

In 1844, when Herman Melville landed in Boston, provincial American society was in that state of uneasy transformation which means either a vaster accomplishment or destruction;...

In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of finding himself established as an author an...

We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs. Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her confinement. At the end of January the last pr...

write anything that did not have his signature on every page. The marks of haste in Redburn are in its simplicity and its reliance upon memory: the reflective and critical passa...

It was time for Melville to begin work again. In February, 1850, he owed his publisher, Harper’s, more than seven hundred dollars in advances not covered by royalties. He did wh...

Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is the story of the eternal Narcissus in ma...

Moby-Dick was done. In the fall of 1851 it appeared, first in England, then, a few weeks later, in America. Melville was exhausted, exhausted and overwrought. In the prodigious...

We now draw near the Cape Horn of Melville’s life; and I would remind the reader of Melville’s own prophetic words in White-Jacket: “Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Ca...

By 1856 Herman Melville had, I think, reached the bottom of his woe, and he was on the point of resignation--resigning his career, his hope of livelihood and fame, the high plac...

Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War there was a vast difference. The Civil...

of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, gene...

The days pass and one day is like another: there is comfort in monotony. The brick house in East Twenty-sixth Street, with its muddy-yellow exterior and its brownstone trim, wit...