Herman Melville

Born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the third child of Allan Melvill, a prosperous importer of French goods, and Maria Gansevoort, whose family was among the old Dutch aristocracy of upstate New York. When Herman was twelve, his father went bankrupt, descended into madness, and died, the family later added the final e to their name. Poverty forced the boy through a series of jobs: bank clerk, farmhand, schoolteacher. In 1839, at nineteen, he shipped out as a cabin boy on a merchant vessel bound for Liverpool, and in January 1841 he sailed from New Bedford on the whaling ship Acushnet. Eighteen months later, exhausted by brutal conditions, he and a companion deserted in the Marquesas Islands, where they lived among the Typee, a tribe reputed to be cannibals. He escaped on an Australian whaler, was briefly imprisoned in Tahiti for mutiny, and eventually enlisted on the USS United States before being discharged in Boston in 1844. Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his Polynesian sojourn, was an instant success. He married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts, in 1847. But his ambition outpaced his audience. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), dedicated to his Berkshire neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, was met with bewilderment and poor sales; in his entire lifetime it sold barely 3,700 copies. Pierre (1852) was savaged by critics. The failure broke something in him. He wrote stories for magazines, among them "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) and "Benito Cereno" (1855), then fell silent, taking a job as a customs inspector on the New York docks, a post he held for nearly twenty years. He died on September 28, 1891, leaving the novella Billy Budd in manuscript; it was not published until 1924.

In July 1841, aboard the whaler Acushnet, Melville met a teenage sailor, William Henry Chase, whose father had survived a sperm whale sinking the ship Essex two decades before. The boy lent him his father's account of the wreck. Melville read it near the very latitude where the Essex went down.