American writer and poet (1819–1891)
People connected to Herman Melville
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.
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 C…
Sourced, dated quotes from Herman Melville
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.
Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips — lo, they are yours and not mine.
Truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.
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