Herman Melville
American writer and poet (1819-1891) · United States · Writers · Died at 72
Herman Melville is read about 2,666 times a day, in 91 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
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Something wrong?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.
A life in dates
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Herman Melville by Joseph O Eaton
Bartleby ou la formule; Bartleby, the Scrivener - A Story of Wall Street
Battle Pieces review
Edward Fitzgerald Upshur 18 Oct 41 re R Lucas
Herman melvile
Log of the USS United States August 18 1843 entry of Herman Melville O S as crew
Log of USS United States, re David Black, dated 4 Oct 1843. Black was swept overboard
Marquesas Islands-Melville 1846In their own words 10
, 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 joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them.
Not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated?
In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous - catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt.
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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.
Writers from the United States 6
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