# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/herman-melville
# Generated: 2026-09-02T06:06:51.653Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/herman-melville"
name: "Herman Melville"
slug: "herman-melville"
description: "He wrote what's now called the Great American Novel, but died unknown. Moby-Dick bombed in 1851, critics savaged his follow-ups, and Melville spent his last decades as a customs inspector, privately printing poetry no one read. The revival didn't start until 1919—twenty-eight years after his death."
tagline: "American writer and poet (1819–1891)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Herman_Melville_by_Joseph_O_Eaton.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "United States"
  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Writers"
  slug: "writers"
profileType:
  name: "Writer / Author"
  slug: "writer"
birthDate: "1819-08-01"
deathDate: "1891-09-28"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           72.63
  momentum:             0
  historical:           26.079684
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     70
  profileCompleteness:  80
  trendDirection:       "STABLE"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
  - name: "Writers"
    slug: "writers"
  - name: "Writer / Author"
    slug: "writer-author"
  - name: "Poetry"
    slug: "poetry"
  - name: "Literature"
    slug: "literature"
  - name: "Fiction"
    slug: "fiction"
  - name: "United States"
    slug: "united-states"
  - name: "Americas"
    slug: "americas"
  - name: "19th Century"
    slug: "19th-century"
platforms:
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    url:       "https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0578479/"
    handle:    "nm0578479"
  - platform:  "WEBSITE"
    url:       "http://www.melville.orh"
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    title: "Wikipedia"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
  - url: "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4985"
    title: "Wikidata"
    type:  "WIKIDATA"
  - url: "https://pantheon.world/profile/person/Herman%20Melville"
    title: "Pantheon 2.0"
    type:  "DATABASE"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "هرمان ملفيل"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "ھێرمێن مێلڤێل"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Χέρμαν Μέλβιλ"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
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    title: "Herman Melville"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
    type:  "WEBSITE"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
    type:  "WEBSITE"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
    type:  "WEBSITE"
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    title: "Wikiquote"
    type:  "WEBSITE"
  - url: "https://musicbrainz.org/artist/3db5e88d-ea25-4344-a9fd-cefb1ae64630"
    title: "MusicBrainz"
    type:  "DATABASE"

# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born August 1, 1819, in New York City, Melville was the son of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family broke. He went to sea in 1839 as a common sailor, then shipped on the whaler Acushnet in 1841 before jumping ship in the Marquesas. His first books—Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), romanticized South Pacific adventures—sold well enough that he married the daughter of a Boston jurist. But Moby-Dick, which took a year and a half to write, found no audience, and Pierre was scorned. He turned to magazine stories ("Bartleby," "Benito Cereno") and published his last prose work, The Confidence-Man, in 1857. By 1863 he was a New York customs inspector, writing poetry in private. His son Malcolm died from a self-inflicted gunshot in 1867; another son, Stanwix, died of tuberculosis in 1886. Melville retired that year, left Billy Budd unfinished, and died of cardiovascular disease on September 28, 1891.