Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) is best known as an author of novels, short stories, and poetry, most notably the masterpiece Moby-Dick, or The Whale.  He was born in New York City in 1819 to a genteel family.  The failure of family’s prosperous import business and untimely death of his father forced Melville to work in a bank at age thirteen. After working as a school teacher and reporter he went to sea at age nineteen. His second voyage took him to the South Seas, where he abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands in the summer of 1842 and accidentally spent a month in the company of a tribe of cannibals. His experiences formed the core of his first novel, Typee: A Peep At Polynesian Life, which became a best seller and was followed by Omoo, a continuation of his chronicle. He became known as “the man who lived among the cannibals”.

Melville eventually settled in the Berkshires near Nathaniel Hawthorn, who became a close friend. Melville read widely and immersed himself in metaphysics, and his work increasingly addressed philosophical issues, beginning with Mardi in 1849 and continuing through Moby-Dick in 1851 and Pierre in 1852.  Both books met with indifference and ended his run as a popular author.  After publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857 he stopped writing novels and worked as a customs inspector in New York for twenty years.  He began to write poetry and published small collections privately.  He had numerous connections with those involved in The Civil War, and the conflict became the chief subject of his poetry. His little known Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) is ranked with his novels by many critics. Melville died of a heart attack in relative obscurity in 1891.  His work was largely ignored until it was rediscovered in the 1920’s by literary historians developing an American literary tradition.