Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used with permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading Copyright © 2003 by Carl F. Hovde.

 

Note on Herman Melville, The World of Herman Melville and Moby-Dick, Inspired by Moby-Dick, and Comments & Questions Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

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Moby-Dick

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-018-1

eISBN : 97-8-141-14336-5

ISBN-10: 1-59308-018-2

LC Control Number 2003100589

 

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Printed in the United States of America

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HERMAN MELVILLE

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. His father was an importer of French goods and his mother the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero. During a national economic depression, the family business faltered; Herman’s father was unable to stabilize it or provide an adequate income. The family moved to Albany in 1830, and in 1832 Allan Melvill died, leaving the family in debt.

Young Herman took a series of jobs to help support his mother and siblings, working as a bank clerk, a farmhand, and a teacher. He also tried to earn money by writing and in 1839 published two installments of “Fragments from a Writing Desk” in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser. However, his career as a serious, full-time writer was not to begin for another seven years. During that interval, Melville worked as a seaman on ships traveling around the world. In 1841 he sailed aboard the Acushnet, a whaling vessel bound for the South Seas, and spent time in the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Hawaii. His foreign adventures provided material for his first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), which were very successful.

In 1847 Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts and a close friend of his sisters. Around the same time, he began a friendship with Evert Duyckinck, an editor of The Literary World, who introduced him to members of the New York literary scene. Over the next few years, he wrote articles for The Literary World and Yankee Doodle, a satirical magazine modeled on the British magazine Punch. In 1849 Melville published Mardi, in which he combined a Polynesian adventure with a doomed symbolic quest. When Mardi was not well received, he tried to return to his earlier, more successful storytelling mode with Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), but the books turned out to be too serious and melancholy to reach a wide audience.

In 1850 Melville purchased a farm, Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and thus became a neighbor to author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The two had a close friendship—Melville dedicated his masterwork, Moby-Dick (1851), to Hawthorne. Like his other recent novels, Moby-Dick was not highly acclaimed when it was first published. Critics and readers were confused and disappointed, having expected a narrative more akin to the literary-journalistic style of the author’s earlier works. The failure of Moby-Dick and of his subsequent novels tormented Melville. He eventually gave up writing as a profession and for nineteen years held a job as a customs inspector at New York harbor. During this time he wrote poetry, some of it reflecting the political climate of the 1860s, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Herman Melville died in 1891. It was not until the “Melville revival” of the 1920s that Moby-Dick and the author’s other works gained him the status in which he is held today—as one of America’s greatest writers. Melville’s short novel Billy Budd was published in 1924.

THE WORLD OF HERMAN MELVILLE ANDMOBY-DICK

1819Herman Melvill is born on August 1 in New York City to Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill, the third of eight children. (The family will add the final ‘e’ in Melville after Allan’s death.) The United States is recovering from an economic depression, and businesses like Allan Melvill’s import concern are still struggling. The family is financially unstable and frequently borrows money from relatives.
1826Herman contracts scarlet fever, which leaves him with permanently weakened eyesight.
1830Allan Melvill’s business fails, and the family moves to Albany, New York. Herman enrolls at the Albany Academy, where he remains until his father’s death.
1832Allan Melvill dies, deeply in debt. Herman takes a number of jobs, such as bank clerk and farmhand, to help his family financially.
1835Herman enrolls in the Albany Classical School, where he is exposed to James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and other early-nineteenth-century British poets.
1837Melville teaches in a school near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The family is forced into bankruptcy and can no longer maintain their home in Albany.