Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819 into a wealthy merchant family; both his grandfathers were heroes of the War of Independence. When he was twelve his father went bankrupt and soon died in debt, and the boy had to leave school, working as a bank clerk, farm hand and schoolteacher. At twenty he first went to sea as a merchant sailor, and at twenty-one shipped on a whaler bound for the South Pacific; he jumped ship in the Marquesas and lived a month in a valley of cannibals, joined a mutiny in Tahiti, and came home as a sailor on an American warship. The South Sea adventure novels he drew from these experiences sold well for a time, but Moby-Dick, into which he poured himself, was coldly received. His later work found ever fewer readers; for nineteen years he served as a customs inspector in New York, unknown, and at his death the newspapers gave him only a few lines. Not until the 1920s was he rediscovered and hailed as one of America's greatest novelists.