Herman Melville

-painful childhood in Albany, NY-without a father; poverty-unsympathetic mother whom he believed hated him.

•worked several jobs including bank clerk, retail sales, farming, and teaching.

-at the age of 17, Melville shipped out to sea as a cabin boy.

-four years wandering and collecting memories that furnished the material for the rest of his career.

South Seas on the whaler Acushnet. 18-month voyage basis for his most famous book, Moby Dick.

-jumped ship at the Marquesas (French Polynesia & Survivor site)

-exotic adventures in Typee and Mardi, -held captive by savages -escaped on an Australian trader.

-Jumped ship again in Tahiti

-worked as a field laborer depicted native life in Omoo.

agreed philosophically with Rousseau's idea of "the Noble Savage."

virtues of the primitive man set against the missionaries' narrow way of life.

Next traveled to Honolulu

enlisted as an ordinary seaman on the frigate USS United States.

a year later returned to Boston.

Melville returned to civilian life a romantic hero who had lived among cannibals and traveled the world.

(one of the first white men to travel to the islands of the South Seas)

On the other hand, he drew much criticism

Like Rousseau, M believed that missionaries ruined the natural joy, exuberance, and innocence of native peoples.

In 1847 Melville married Elizabeth, the daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts. -visited England and Paris, and moved his family to the farm Arrowhead, where they would live for the next thirteen years.

friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived nearby at Lenox

wrote Moby Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne.

In 1856, M went to the Holy Land - south-sea wanderings rep the perfect in the physical realm- viewed the land of Israel as the center of Western spirituality

His life from this point would be an attempt to reconcile the physical with the spiritual.

-The Civil War provided material for expressing his inner conflict

- a mirror image of the greater external one taking place on battlefields across the South

Southern poets like Catholic priest Abram Joseph Ryan (the Confederacy's poet laureate), William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville are the poets of the "Civil War."

M ignored because of his politics, even though Melville is arguably a better poet than Whitman.  

Melville questioned deeply the democratic faith and the union

Thus, opposing Lincoln’s ideas. M the war poet had doomed himself to obscurity.

-lectured on the South Seas and on Roman Statuary to supplement income

- after failing to receive an appointment for a consulship, he completely withdrew from society.

Melville moved his family to New York, but he passed entirely out of the public eye

Like many American authors, Melville did not receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime.

Although famous in Eng, Am ignored him until the 1920s when books about the South Seas suddenly came into vogue.

Melville's writing: sense of a constant struggle between good and evil, liberty and chance, and the known and unknown. Today, Melville is truly regarded as one of the American literary greats