Herman Melville (Author) American novelist and poet, a major literary figure whose exploration of psychological and metaphysical themes foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns. The fictionalized travel narrative of Typee (1846) was Melville's most popular book during his lifetime, but his works remained in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. Melville is best-known for his novels of the sea and his masterpiece Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851), a whaling adventure dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Melville was born in New York City, into a family whose fortunes had declined. He was the third child of eight. His father, Allan Melvill, an importer of French dry goods, became bankrupt and insane, dying when Melville was 12. His mother, Maria Gansevoort Melvill, was left alone to raise eight children. He left the school and was largely autodidact, devouring Shakespeare as well as historical, anthropological, and technical works. He became a bank clerk, but in search of adventure in 1839 he shipped to Liverpool, England, as a cabin boy. When he returned to the United States he taught school and then sailed for the South Seas in 1841 on the whaler Acushnet. After an 18-month voyage Melville deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands and with a companion lived for a month among the natives, who were cannibals. He escaped aboard an Australian trader, leaving it at Papeete, Tahiti, where he was imprisoned temporarily. He worked as a field laborer and then shipped to Honolulu, Hawaii, where in 1843 he enlisted as a seaman on the U.S. Navy frigate United States.

Melville's first five novels all achieved quick popularity. His adventures in the Marquesas and Tahiti inspired his first two books, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), an account of his stay with the cannibals, and its sequel, Omoo, a Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), based on his experiences in Polynesian Islands.

Throughout his career Melville enjoyed a rather higher estimation in Britain than in America. His older brother Gansevoort held a government position in London, and helped to launch Melville's career. From his third book, Mardi & a Voyage Thither (1849), a complex allegorical fantasy, Melville started to take distance to the expectations of his readers. Redburn, His First Voyage (1849), based on Melville's first trip to sea, and White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War (1850), a fictionalization of his experiences in the navy, exposed the abuse of sailors that was prevalent in the U.S. Navy at that time.

In 1847 Melville married Elisabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts, and in 1850 Melville moved to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he became an intimate friend of the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Melville dedicated his masterpiece, Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851).

The central theme of this novel is the conflict between Captain Ahab, master of the whaler Pequod, and Moby-Dick, a great white whale that once tore off one of Ahab's legs at the knee. Ahab is dedicated to revenge; he drives himself and his crew, which includes Ishmael, the narrator of the story, over the seas in a desperate search for his enemy. The body of the book is written in a wholly original, powerful narrative style, which, in certain sections of the work, Melville varied with great success. The most impressive of these sections include the rhetorically magnificent sermon delivered before sailing and the soliloquies of the mates; lengthy “flats,” passages conveying nonnarrative material, usually of a technical nature, such as the chapter about whales; and the more purely ornamental passages, such as the tale of the Tally-Ho. These sections can stand by themselves as short stories of merit. The work is invested with Ishmael's sense of profound wonder at his story, but it nonetheless conveys full awareness that Ahab's quest can have but one end. And so it proves to be: Moby-Dick destroys the Pequod and all its crew. The only survivor is the narrator, Ishmael, who is rescued by a passing ship. The reader is confronted by a plurality of linguistic discourses, philosophical speculations, and Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging.

When the novel was published, it did not bring him the fame he had acquired in the 1840s. Readers of Typhee and Omo were not expecting this kind of story, and its brilliance was only noted by some critics. Through the story Melville meditated questions about faith and the workings of God's intelligence. Moby-Dick was not a financial success -it sold only some 3,000 copies during Melville's lifetime-, and Melville's next novel, Pierre: or the Ambiguities (1852), a a Gothic romance and psychological study based on the author's childhood and an allegorical exploration of the nature of evil, was a critical and financial failure. Today, however, it enjoys some acceptance by critics and the public. Israel Potter (1855), a historical romance, was equally unsuccessful. Although he became to be regarded as one of the USA's greatest writers, he did not have any great success in his lifetime and became disillusioned.

The Piazza Tales (1856) contains some of Melville's finest shorter works; particularly notable are the powerful short stories Benito Cereno (1855) and Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), a story about a man, who confronts life with an Everlasting Nay - "I would prefer not to," is his quiet defense against onrushing materialism of the day; and the ten descriptive sketches of the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador, titled The Encantadas (1854).

The novel The Confidence-Man (1857), was a harsh satire of American life set on a Mississippi River steamboat. Once more he was ready to risk a book of the kind said to "fail." During 1856 he worked on what would be seen a century later as his second masterpiece, The Confidence-Man (1857). In substance it is his most obviously American book and in tone and form the most modern. Fantastic and blackly comic, and basically a fugue on the universal theme of belief and doubt, it is set in the American heartland and is thick with American stereotypes, thinly disguised celebrities, recognizable landmarks, timely allusion, elements of folklore and popular culture, and topics of immediate national interest. Its modernity is manifest in the discipline of its formal progress, a movement that deliberately lacks motion, and in the orchestration of the language and logic.

The sources of Melville's masquerade include his youthful trip on the Western riverboats, a "fancy dress picnic" in September 1855 about which there was much ado in Pittsfield, and the career of a New York swindler known as "The Confidence Man," whose exploitation of the trustful was reported in the New York press in 1849 when he was jailed and in 1855 when he was again at large. The wider sources include Melville's reading in myth, metaphysics, satire, and Shakespeare. Less directly but more profoundly among the sources of The Confidence-Man is Melville's notion, pervasive in the 1850s, that life is some kind of April Fool joke played on man. Thus he wrote his friend and Lizzie's cousin, Henry Savage: "It is--or seems to be--a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of a joke.... And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed around pretty liberally and impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it." The same idea is voiced by Ishmael in Moby-Dick. There are times, he says, "when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."

In The Confidence-Man the practical joke is enacted between dawn and midnight of April Fool's Day aboard a Mississippi steamboat named the Fidele. Its main texts are the biblical injunction from Corinthians, "Charity thinketh no evil," displayed by a suspiciously mysterious deaf mute, and a barber's sign stating that he will trust no one with credit. The word "confidence" is the subject of elaborate and repeated conceits. The novel is an allegorical satire aimed on the one hand at the foolish pieties and philanthropic pretensions and on the other at the knavish materialism of an overconfident America. There is little action. The structure is a sequence of ritualistic games between confidence men in grotesque guises and their victims, victimized as often because of their virtues as their vices. The Fidele moves down river from St. Louis and the various confidence men merge into a single figure who is a cosmopolitan and composite Confidence Man, while many of the passengers he confronts seem to become, in some ways, confidence men. Blandly and persuasively the Confidence Man preaches charity and plants distrust.

The satire at times is corrosive but it is also playful, and at bottom the book is skeptical rather than destructive. Like the white whale, the Confidence Man is ultimately beyond knowing, and like Moby-Dick this novel is a manual for survival in a sea where the sharks glide.

Melville completed The Confidence-Man in the summer of 1856. It is the more remarkable as a literary achievement because this was not a good time. He was plagued with sciatica and, unable to work his farm properly, considering a move back to New York. His house full of women and children often depressed him, and writing always strained him and those about him. Matters reached the point that Judge Shaw, "informed by some of the family, how very ill, Herman has been," proposed "a voyage or a journey" and extended a loan.

The prospect lifted Melville's spirits. By early October he was in New York visiting Evert Duyckinck, from whom he had drifted apart, "fresh from his mountain charged to the muzzle with sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable," Duyckinck records in his diary. He placed the manuscript of The Confidence-Man with Dix and Edwards just before sailing for Glasgow on 11 October. It was the last prose fiction that he published in his lifetime, the tenth book within eleven years (besides reviews and other uncollected magazine pieces), and marks the beginning of his withdrawal from a public literary career. Like Moby-Dick, The Confidence-Man was out of joint with the times.

After 1857 he wrote only some poetry. His health was failing, he did not earn enough money to support his family, and he was a dependent of his wealthy father-in-law.

Between 1866 and 1885 Melville worked as a customs inspector in New York City in order to support himself. During this period he published poetry that has since gained increasing respect, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), and the book-length Clarel (1876), a long poem about religious crisis, was based on this strip, and reflected his Manichean view of God. The book was ignored. Subsequent works were privately printed and distributed among a very small circle of acquaintances.

Melville's later works include privately printed John Marr and other sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891).

His last work was the novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1924), a story left unfinished at his death. Its manuscript was found in Melville's desk when he died and was published posthumously. It is the story of a young sailor, personifying innocence, who is doomed by the malevolent hatred of a ship's officer, personifying evil. The subtle, but pervasive homoerotic undertones of Herman Melville's writing was first noted by Leslie Fiedler, (1960). The work was adapted as an opera in 1951 by the English composer Benjamin Britten in collaboration with the English novelist E. M. Forster, and both as a play and as a film in 1962.

Melville's death on September 28, 1891, in New York, was noted with only one obituary notice.

Sources: Andreas Teuber , & Books Of The World