Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819,
as the third child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. (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
Melville, 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 January 3, 1841, he sailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts on the whaler Acushnet,[1] 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 deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in July 1842.[1] For three weeks he lived among the Typee natives, who were called cannibals by the two other tribal groups on the island though they treated Melville very well. His book Typee
describes a brief love affair with a beautiful native girl, Fayaway,
who generally "wore the garb of Eden" and came to epitomize the
guileless noble savage in the popular imagination, but we have no evidence of Melville's actual activities among the islanders.
Melville did not seem to be concerned about repercussions from his desertion of the Acushnet.
He boarded another whaler bound for Hawaii and left that ship in
Honolulu. After working as a clerk for four months he joined the crew
of the frigate USS United States, which reached Boston in October of 1844. These experiences were described in Typee, Omoo, and White Jacket, which were published as novels mainly because few believed their veracity.
Typee was published in 1846 in London after being rejected by
a Boston publisher; it became an overnight bestseller in London. The
Boston publisher subsequently accepted Omoo sight unseen. Typee and Omoo
gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer, although
the novels did not generate enough royalties for him to live on. Omoo was not as colorful as Typee, and readers began to realize Melville was not just producing adventure stories. Redburn and White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers. Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.
Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of noted Massachusetts jurist Lemuel Shaw) on August 4, 1847. They had four children, two sons and two 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 and encouraged by his new relationship with
Hawthorne [2] during the very period that he was writing one of the greatest works in the English language, Moby-Dick (dedicating it to Hawthorne[3]), 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 American Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War
(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.
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