Herman Melville

Herman Melville (August 1 1819 – September 28 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, and his popularity declined precipitously only a few years later. By the time of his death he had been almost completely forgotten, but his longest novel, Moby-Dick — largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and most responsible for Melville's fall from favor with the reading public — was rediscovered in the 20th century as one of the chief literary masterpieces of both American and world literature.

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Life

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, as the third child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melville. (After Allan died, Maria added an "e" to the surname.) Part of a well-established - if colorful - Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad doing business deals as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, an honored survivor of the Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need. The maternal side of Melville's family was Hudson Valley Dutch. His maternal grandfather was General Peter Gansevoort, a hero of the battle of Saratoga; in his gold-laced uniform, the general sat for a portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart. The portrait appeared in Melville's later novel, Pierre, for Melville wrote out of his familial as well as his nautical background. Like the titular character in Pierre, Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."^{[citation needed]}

Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. The new venture ended in disastrous failure, and in 1832 Allan Melvill died of a sudden illness that included mental collapse, leaving his family in poverty. Although Maria had well-off kin, they were concerned with protecting their own inheritances and taking advantage of investment opportunities rather than settling their mother's estate so Maria's family would be more secure.

Herman Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a cabin boy on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.

The succeeding three years (1837 to 1840) (voyage to Liverpool was 1839) were mostly occupied with school-teaching. Near the end of 1840 he once again decided to sign ship's articles; on New Year's Day, 1841, he sailed from Fairhaven, Massachusetts on the whaler Acushnet, which was bound for the Pacific Ocean. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. Melville left very little direct information about the events of this 18 months' cruise, although his whaling romance, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, probably gives many pictures of life on board the Acushnet. Melville decided to abandon the vessel on reaching the Marquesas Islands. He lived among the natives of the island for three weeks and the narrative of Typee tells of this while the sequel, Omoo, deals with his stay in Tahiti and a nearby island. After this sojourn to the Society Islands, Melville shipped on a whaler and was discharged in Hawaii. He remained in Honolulu four months, working as a clerk. He joined the crew of the American frigate United States, which, after sailing in the Pacific for many months, reached Boston in October of 1844. He would eventually experience overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer with the 1846 publication of Typee. For the next four years, he would have other successes, but none would be on the order of his very first one. Omoo (the sequel to Typee), Mardi (a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn), Redburn, and White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers and were first serialized before being printed as books. Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of noted Massachusetts jurist Lemuel Shaw) on August 4, 1847. They had four children, 2 sons and 2 daughters. In 1850 they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that is today a museum. Here Melville remained for thirteen years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm. There he befriended the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived in nearby Lenox. Melville, something of an intellectual loner for most of his life, was tremendously inspired by his new relationship with Hawthorne when he was writing what many have come to regard as one of the greatest works in the English language, Moby-Dick (dedicating it to Hawthorne), though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when he wrote Pierre there. However, these works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books. Following scathing reviews of Pierre by critics, publishers became wary of Melville's work. His publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected his next manuscript, Isle of the Cross which has been lost.

For financial reasons, Melville was persuaded while in Pittsfield to enter what was for others the lucrative field of lecturing. From 1857 to 1860, he spoke at lyceums, chiefly on the South Seas. Turning to poetry, he gathered a collection of verse that failed to interest a publisher. In 1863, he and his wife resettled, with their four children, in New York City. After the end of the Civil War, he published "Battle-Pieces" (1866), a collection of over seventy poems that was generally panned by critics. His professional writing career was at an end and his marriage was unhappy when in 1867 his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally. Pulling his life together, Melville used his influence to obtain a position as customs inspector for the City of New York (a humble but adequately-paying appointment), and held the post for 19 years. (The customs house was ironically on Gansevoort St., which was named after his mother's prosperous family.) In 1876 his uncle Peter Gansevoort, by a bequest, paid for the publication of the massive epic poem, "Clarel." Two volumes of poetry followed: John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891).

After an illness that lasted several months, Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, age 72. His New York Times obituary called him "Henry Melville." He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.

From about age thirty-three, Melville ceased to be popular with a broad audience because of his increasingly philosophical, political and experimental tendencies. His novella Billy Budd, Sailor, unpublished at the time of his death, was published in 1924. Later it was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, a play, and a film by Peter Ustinov.

In Herman Melville's Religious Journey, Walter Donald Kring detailed his discovery of letters indicating that Melville had been a member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Until this revelation, little had been known of his religious affiliation. Parker in the second volume of his biography makes it clear that Melville became a nominal member only to placate his wife. He despised Unitarianism and its associated "ism", Utilitarianism. (The great English Unitarians were Utilitarians.) See the 2006 Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man for more detail on Melville and religion than in Parker's 2002 volume.

Publications and contemporary reactions

  All of Melville's novels were published first in England and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences; at other times different printings were either bowdlerized or restored to their pre-bowdlerized state. (For specifics on different publication dates, editions, printings, etc., please see entries for individual novels.)

Moby-Dick has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest literary works of all time. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, The Confidence-Man and many short stories and works of various genres.

Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until late in life. After the Civil War, he published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later.^[1] But again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. This may be the longest single poem in American literature. The poem, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut".^{[citation needed]} In other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.

His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States, others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view.^{[citation needed]} Clarel has won the admiration of no less a critic than Helen Vendler, who read it in preparation for the 1976 Pittsfield Centennial Celebration.

The Melville Revival

After the success of travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on misadventures in the merchant marine and navy, Melville's popularity declined dramatically. In the later years of his life and during the years after his death he was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature. However, a confluence of publishing events in the 1920s brought about a reassessment now commonly called the Melville Revival. The two books generally considered most important to the Revival^{[citation needed]} were both brought forth by Raymond Weaver: his 1921 biography Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic and his 1924 version of Melville's last great but never quite finished or properly organized work, Billy Budd, which Melville's granddaughter gave to Weaver when he visited her for research on the biography. The other works that helped fan the Revival flames were Carl Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and Lewis Mumford's biography, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Work (1929).

Criticism and reputation in the wake of the Revival

The Revival spurred an earnest and contentious first wave of Melville criticism. Much of it centered on Billy Budd and Moby-Dick; Pierre had passionate admirers in England in the 1920s; much of his other work was shunted to the side because it was deemed too lacking in artistic merit (e.g., the poetry); too strange or obscure (e.g., The Confidence-Man); too minor, especially since Melville viewed it that way (e.g., Redburn and Israel Potter); or some combination thereof.^{[citation needed]}

Given its recent discovery and printing and thus its "true" novelty, Billy Budd was the text that most critics initially pounced on.^{[citation needed]} Criticism largely fell into two camps, the "resignationists" (a.k.a. the "literalists") and the "ironists." The resignationists believed that Billy Budd was a fairly straightforward testament of Melville's resignation to his fate as an author and human being, whereas the ironists thought the work provided ample evidence that Melville meant the work to be taken as irony and thus a cry against injustice and the very opposite of resignation. This dispute over Melville's fundamental attitude—was he a conservative or a radical?—would color the arguments for the rest of the first wave. Better term than resignationist? Why not use the conventional Testament of Acceptance vs Testament of Defiance?

Other movements found in Melville a worthy precursor. For instance, many Existentialists and Absurdists saw "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a prescient exploration and embodiment of their concerns.

Many of the disputants in the critical battles over some of Melville's more provocative works ultimately realized that many of their questions and critical speculations would not be answered until more texts were discovered, further definitive texts were established, and more facts of Melville's life were unearthed.^{[citation needed]} Biographical needs brought about such works as Jay Leyda's The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951)and Leon Howard's Herman Melville: A Biography (1951) which was based on Leyda's information. The "correct version" of Billy Budd, however, was always in dispute; several different editors brought out their own versions in the decades after Weaver's appeared. It was not until Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts, Jr., published a definitive text of Billy Budd in 1962 that scholars were generally agreed on the content if not the thrust of Melville's "final statement". Consequently, another reappraisal began, using this definitive version to look back on all of Melville's other production and his own apparent use of Billy Budd to take stock of it as he neared death.

Recent critical appreciations and controversy

In recent years have appeared two full biographies Hershel Parker's Herman Melville: A Biography (Vol. 1, 1996; Vol. 2, 2002), an extensive and informative pair of tomes, and Laurie Robertson-Lorant's Melville: A Biography (1996), which contains literary criticism, unlike Parker's, and is notable for its demonstration that Melville's politico-social attitudes are strikingly modern. Such writers are reconfirming Melville's status as one of American literature's most significant and representative figures. A newer popular critico-biographical survey in the manner of Lewis Mumford and Robertson-Lorant is Andrew Delbanco's 2005 "Melville: His World and Work," which brings Melville's relevance into the early 21st century as Robertson-Lorant had brought it into the mid 1990s.

More and more critical scrutiny is focusing on the elements in Melville's work impinging on a host of new areas, among them post-colonialism and imperialism, race and ethnography, internationalism, body criticism, and even ecology.^{[citation needed]} For example, the 1855 short story "Benito Cereno" is one of the few works of 19th century American literature to confront the African diaspora and the violent history of race relations in America, while "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" and Billy Budd have been particularly rich for scholars of gender studies. A great many younger critics have followed Bezanson, Stein, Shurr, Robillard, and a few others in studying Melville's poetry, although in 2002 Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz vigorously disputed the idea that Melville had a finished collection of poetry ready for publication in 1860 despite the documentary evidence first published by Minnigerode (1922), which includes Melville's 12-memo to his brother Allan on the publication of his verses. The denial of the reality of The Isle of the Cross and Poems, according to a June 2007 article by Parker in the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, has distorted the whole trajectory of Melville's career. The topic is reviewed in Parker's MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET (Northwestern University Press), out late 2007 but dated 2008.

Bibliography

Novels

• Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
• Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
• Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)
• Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)
• White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (1850)
• Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851)
• Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
• Isle of the Cross (ca. 1853, since lost)^[2]
• Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1856)
• The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857)
• Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (1924)

Short stories

• The Piazza Tales (1856)
  • "The Piazza" -- the only story specifically written for the collection. (The other five had previously been published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine.)
  • "Bartleby the Scrivener"
  • "Benito Cereno"
  • "The Lightning-Rod Man"
  • "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles"
  • "The Bell-Tower"
• Uncollected
  • "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December 1853)
  • "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June 1854)
  • "The Happy Failure" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July 1854)
  • "The Fiddler" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, September 1854)
  • "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, April 1855)
  • "Jimmy Rose" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November 1855)
  • "The 'Gees" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, March 1856)
  • "I and My Chimney" (Putnam's Monthly Magazine, March 1856)
  • "The Apple-Tree Table" (Putnam's Monthly Magazine, May 1856)
• Unpublished in Melville's lifetime
  • "The Two Temples"
  • "Daniel Orme"

Poetry

Books

• Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866)
• Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876)
• John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) Online edition
• Timoleon (1891) Online edition
• Weeds and Wildings, and a Rose or Two (1924)

Uncollected or unpublished poems

• "Epistle to Daniel Shepherd"
• "Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh" [sic]
• "The Admiral of the White"
• "To Tom"
• "Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-temple in Arcadia"
• "Puzzlement"
• "The Continents"
• "The Dust-Layers"
• "A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855"
• "A Reasonable Constitution"
• "Rammon"
• "A Ditty of Aristippus"
• "In a Nutshell"
• "Adieu"

Anthologized poems

• "The Maldive Shark"
• "Song from Mardi"
• "Jonah's Song" (from Moby-Dick) ["The ribs and terrors in the whale"]
• "The Portent (1859)"
• "Misgivings (1860)"
• "The Conflict of Convictions (1860-1)"
• "Shiloh: A Requiem (April 1862)"
• "Malvern Hill (July 1862)"
• "The House-top: A Night Piece (July 1863)"
• "'The Coming Storm': A Picture by S. R. Gifford, and owned by E. B. Included in the N. A. Exhibition, April, 1865"
• "'Formerly a Slave': An idealized Portrait, by E. Vedder, in the Spring Exhibition of the National Academy, 1865"
• "America"
• "The Tuft of Kelp"
• "The Berg (A Dream)"
• "After the Pleasure Party"
• "The Ravaged Villa"
• "Art"
• "Shelley's Vision"
• "In a Bye-Canal"
• "Pontoosuce"
• "Billy in the Darbies" (from Billy Budd)
• "Monody"

Essays (all uncollected during Melville's lifetime)

• "Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 1" (Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, May 4, 1839)
• "Fragments from a Writing Desk, No. 2" (Democratic Press, and Lansingburgh Advertiser, May 18, 1839)
• "Etchings of a Whaling Cruise" (New York Literary World, March 6, 1847)
• "Authentic Anecdotes of 'Old Zack'" (Yankee Doodle, II, weekly [September 4 excepted] from July 24 to September 11, 1847)
• "Mr Parkman's Tour" (New York Literary World, March 31, 1849)
• "Cooper's New Novel" (New York Literary World, April 28, 1849)
• "A Thought on Book-Binding" (New York Literary World, March 16, 1850)
• "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (New York Literary World, August 17 and August 24, 1850)

Other

• Correspondence, Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston, IL and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library (1993). ISBN 0-8101-0995-6
  
• Journals, Ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth. Evanston, IL and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Pr. and The Newberry Library (1989). ISBN 0-8101-0823-2

References

Further reading

• Adler, Joyce Sparer. War in Melville's Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 1981. ISBN 0-8147-0575-8
• Bryant, John, ed. A Companion to Melville Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. ISBN 031323874X
• Bryant, John. Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0195077822
• Beaulieu, Victor-Levy. Monsieur Melville. Toronto: Coach House, 1978, tr. 1985. ISBN 0-88910-239-2
• Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Knopf, 2005. ISBN 0-375-40314-0
• Garner, Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville. Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1993. ISBN 0-7006-0602-5
• Hayford, Harrison. "Melville's Prisoners." Foreword by Hershel Parker. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8101-1973-0.
• Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker. "Reading PIERRE, or The Ambiguities." Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. ISBN 13:978-0-8071-3226-5
• Levine, Robert S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. Cambridge, UK & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-521-55571-X
• Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville.
• Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 1, 1819-1851). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Paperback edition, 2005: ISBN 0-8018-8185-4
• Herman Melville: A Biography (Volume 2, 1851-1891). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Paperback edition, 2005: ISBN 0-8018-8186-2
• Parker, Hershel. "Reading BILLY BUDD." Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8101-0962-X (paperback).
• Renker, Elizabeth. Strike Through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Reprint (paperback) edition, 1997: ISBN 0-8018-5875-5
• Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 1996. ISBN 0-517-59314-9
• Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf, 1983. ISBN 0-394-50609-X
• Melville, Herman: Typee, Omoo, Mardi (G. Thomas Tanselle, ed.) (Library of America, 1982) This is the very first volume in the Library of America. ISBN 0-94045000-4
• Melville, Herman: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (G. Thomas Tanselle, ed.) (Library of America, 1983) ISBN 0-94045009-7
• Melville, Herman: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Confidence-Man, Tales & Billy Budd (Harrison Hayford, ed.) (Library of America, 1985) This volume also contains Melville's essays. ISBN 0-94045024-0