He begins writing po etry but cannot find a publisher for his first collection. In 1860 he sails to San Francisco, a trip meant both for enjoy ment and to improve his health, but he has an unpleasant time and returns home to New York via Panama.

1861Melville meets President Abraham Lincoln. The four-year American Civil War begins. Melville’s thoughts on the di vided nation and the war are evident in his poetry. In some poems he reveals a pessimistic fear that a victorious North will be corrupted by its success and in others a sympathy for human suffering and loss.
1863The family moves from Pittsfield to New York City.
1866Melville publishes Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, a series
of poems. He begins work as a customs inspector at New York harbor.
1867Melville’s son Malcolm dies of a self-inflicted gunshot wound; it is unclear whether his death is an accident or suicide.
1876With financial backing from his uncle, Melville publishes Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, which addresses the problem of religious doubt.
1885Melville resigns as customs inspector.
1886His son Stanwix dies of tuberculosis in a San Francisco hos pital.
1888Melville publishes John Marr and Other Sailors, a book of poetry. He takes a short trip to Bermuda.
1891He publishes another book of poems, Timoleon. Melville dies of a heart attack on September 28 in New York City.
1920sBeginning around 1920, in a “Melville revival,” critics re examine the author’s works, to great acclaim.
1924The short novel Billy Budd is published.

INTRODUCTION

Moby-Dick (1851) was Melville’s sixth novel in a series of nine plus a collection of shorter tales, a sequence that began with Typee in 1846 and ended with The Confidence-Man in 1857; there was later poetry, and the novella Billy Budd was found in manuscript after his death in 1891. During these years he showed, for such a period, a productivity unsurpassed in concentration and quality among our best writers, and by common agreement Moby-Dick is the masterpiece. It is often seen as the greatest work of American fiction to date.

It is surely one of our most remarkable. Melville was thirty-four when it appeared, and he had written it in a year and a half, an astonishingly short time given its scope, complexity, and imaginative force. He had worked at great pressure, obsessed with his subject and unforgiving about his schedule.

He sent a copy to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, remarking, “I have written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as a lamb,” and in answering a letter from Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, he wrote:

your allusion . . . to the “Spirit Spout[”] first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing—but I did not, in that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegorical construction, & also that parts of it were—but the specialty of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr. Hawthorne’s letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole (January 8, 1852; from Melville’s Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth, Northwestern-Newberry Edition, 1993; see “For Further Reading”).

Melville’s surprise at the book’s implications doubtless showed more modesty than truth, but it would have been natural enough that in the work of composition he had not been fully conscious of all he had done.

Melville was a writer whose work often began with his own experience, changed and elaborated in the course of composition. At his birth in 1819 the family was economically middle-class though of distinguished heritage, but family fortunes collapsed after his father died when Herman was twelve. He left school for various jobs and when nineteen sailed to Liverpool on a merchant ship, later using that experience in Redburn (1849), his fourth novel. When he was twenty-one he sailed on the whaler Acushnet, and finding life there intolerable after eighteen months, he and a friend jumped ship at the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. They spent almost a month in the Taipi valley living with a native tribe that occasionally practiced cannibalism, a matter much elaborated in his first novel, Typee; the book sold well in part because of the exotic contrast between accounts of attractive native girls and the gory possibilities lurking in the background. He went from the Marquesas Islands to Tahiti and other islands, finally returning to Boston in late 1844, almost four years after he had left the country.

His seafaring and travel adventures underlie five of his nine novels—six if one includes the first part of Mardi (1849)—but none is literally autobiographical. Typee, Omoo (1847), Redburn, and White-Jacket (1850), unlike Moby-Dick, depend in some measure on particular episodes in Melville’s life, while Moby-Dick draws more generally on his experience of the open ocean and his knowledge of life in a whaling ship.

Melville read widely, and one book was particularly important to him in developing the story: Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex (1821). Chase was first mate on the Essex when, in the Pacific, it was rammed and sunk by a large sperm whale. A number of the crew survived after long suffering, and Melville read Chase’s account with great interest, especially the description of the whale’s apparent malignity.

Moby-Dick’s plot is simple enough. The whaling Captain Ahab had lost a leg in an encounter with the white whale Moby Dick and is bent on revenge. When recovered he goes to sea again and pretends for a time to search for oil, but his wound has made him mad with hatred, and he lives only to kill the animal that maimed him. Almost all the crew follow his plan because of his charismatic leadership. They find the whale, Ahab is killed while attacking it, and the ship, the Pequod, sinks after Moby Dick rams it.