"What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. "

 –Herman Melville, Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851 

Herman Melville was born in 1819 to a wealthy merchant family in New York, where he grew up listening to his father’s fantastical sea-faring tales of terror and adventure, and of places far away. But when Herman was 12 his father died and left the family penniless. By the mid-1830s, the young Melville had already begun writing, but continued financial problems for the family forced him to focus primarily on work. In 1837, his brother arranged for Herman to ship out as cabin boy on the St. Lawrence, a merchant ship sailing in June 1839 from New York City for Liverpool.

When he returned to the states he tried to find work to help his family. Finding none, he joined the crew of a whaling ship, Acushnet, on its way to Polynesia in January 1841. After the 18-month voyage, he jumped ship and lived for two months with a friend amongst the natives of the Marquesas Islands. From there, he went to Papeete, Tahiti, in the crew of the Australian whaler Lucy Ann. Once in Tahiti, Herman joined a mutiny led by dissatisfied shipmates who had not been paid. The mutiny landed him in jail, though he later escaped. In November 1842 he signed as a harpooner on his last whaler, the Charles & Henry, out of Nantucket, MA. Six months later he disembarked in Hawaii only to sign on as an ordinary seaman on the frigate United States, which in October 1844 returned him to Boston. It was from these adventures that he drew the inspiration for his first two novels, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), which he wrote on his return to America. That year, he married Elizabeth Shaw with whom he had four children. They moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts where he began writing his masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.

He published three more novels within the next three years. However, these works and the five more to follow—including Moby-Dick; or, The Whale—did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books because of his increasingly philosophical, political and experimental tendencies. It was during this time of his life that he met Nathaniel Hawthorn, the well known author who would greatly influence Herman’s future works. Melville often sent his manuscripts to Hawthorn for criticism, and when Moby-Dick was published in 1851, Herman dedicated it to his friend, writing, “In token of my admiration for his genius.”

The captivating book about the sailor Ishmael and Captain Ahab’s search for a great White Whale it brought its author neither acclaim nor reward in his lifetime. However, a “Melville Revival” came in the post World War One era. With the burgeoning of Modernist aesthetics and the war still so fresh in memory, Moby-Dick began to seem increasingly relevant. Many of Melville’s techniques and themes prefigure those of Modernism. He employs a kaleidoscopic, hybrid genre and tone (encompassing narrative plot, descriptions of a sailor’s life aboard a whaling ship, stage directions, extended soliloquies, and asides) and his exploration of themes of violence, hunger for power, reckless disregard for the fate of one’s fellows, and the existence of gods resonated with the newly forming Modern aesthetic of experimentation and fragmentation of the human experience, characterized by deviations from the norms of society. Critical examination of Melville’s work in this period saw Moby-Dick as the pinnacle of American Romanticism and currently, it is considered to be one of the greatest novels in the English language.