Mellvile

Introduction

"Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."

These words begin Herman Melville's masterpiece Moby-Dick. They are also autobiographical.

Writer Herman Melville lived a life as full of adventure as his books. Theson of a formerly prominent New York family, Melville overcame his family's fall from grace in his youth by seeking adventure on the seas. When he returned to solid American ground after a few years as a sailor in his twenties, he realized that he had a gift for spinning fantastic tales out of his experiences. He achieved fame and popularity as a writer with novels inspired by his personalexperiences, like Typee and Omoo. He could have had a very comfortable career churning out the adventure novels that the public wanted to read, but Herman Melville wanted more.

As Melville began challenging himself in his fiction - experimenting with narratives and philosophy - a confused and unappreciative public turned away. Moby-Dick, the book we now think of as a metaphysical classic, made barely asplash in the publishing world when it was released in 1851. Still Melville kept writing, turning out stories, novels and poems that no one wanted to read, let alone buy. He died in 1891 at the age of 72, "an absolutely forgotten man" in the words of one post-mortem article. But though conventional wisdom at the time judged him a failure, time proved differently. Melville never sold out. Herefused to set aside what he knew he had to write in order to write what he knew would sell. Within a generation or two of his death, scholars and readers reappraised Melville, and today he is considered a master of fiction truly before his time.

Like his unfortunate Captain Ahab, Melville never got the validation he sought during his lifetime. But—like Ahab—he went down trying, and his legacy liveson.


Author: Herman Melville.

"There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines," the New York Times wrote a week after Herman Melville's death on 28 September1891. "Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended. . . . He has died an absolutely forgotten man."

When Herman Melville died at the age of 72 in his home in New York City, more people knew him as a retired customs inspector than as a great writer. It hadbeen so long since he'd published anything popular that the few people who remembered his name thought he was dead already. Yet his disappearance from the public's memory was in some ways by choice. Melville knew what kind of books readers wanted to buy. He was just tired of writing them, and couldn't quite convince people to read the new fiction he wanted to write. Melville started out as achronicler of popular tales based on his own experiences as a sailor. But starting with Moby-Dick in 1851, his stories, novels, and poems took an experimental turn, pondering questions of existence and philosophy, toying with traditional ideas of plot and narrative. Though he's now recognized as a master of fiction, readers then found him just weird. Melville was truly a man ahead of his time.

ReadingMelville today can be a daunting experience. He's wordy. Some of his characters, like the frustratingly passive law clerk in "Bartleby, the Scrivener," are confounding. Perhaps you'll think differently, however, when you consider that his books are the product of a true original. Herman Melville said what he thought and wrote what he wanted, even when it was unpopular. He chose honest obscurity...