Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale

About Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-91) became in his late twenties a highly successful author of exotic novels based on his experiences as a sailor - writing in quick succession Typee Omoo Redburn and White-Jacket. However his masterpiece Moby-Dick was met with incomprehension and the other later works which are now the basis of his reputation such as Bartleby the Scrivener and The Confidence-Man were failures. Melville stopped writing fiction and the rest of his long life was spent first as a lecturer and then for nineteen years as a customs official in New York City. He was also the author of the immensely long poem Clarel which was similarly dismissed. At the end of his life he wrote Billy Budd Sailor which was published posthumously in 1924.