Moby-Dick (The Norton Library)

About Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1 1819 the third child of Maria and Allan Gansevoort Melvill. (The final e was added to the family name later.) His fathers financial difficulties and his early death while Melville was still a youth disrupted his formal education. Instead Melville tried his hand at a variety of occupations before joining the crew of a merchant ship bound for England in 1839. Two years later he sailed to the South Seas aboard the whaler Acushnet. His early fiction like the novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) drew upon and often embellished his exotic maritime adventures earning him both popular and critical acclaim. But by the time he published Moby-Dick in 1851 his writing career was in decline as both sales and praise of his works dwindled. Although he would subsequently publish two more novels and a number of short storiesincluding the masterpieces Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito CerenoMelville spent the last three decades of his life primarily writing poetry. Largely forgotten at the time of his death on April 19 1891 Melville along with his unfinished novella Billy Budd was rediscovered and his reputation revived in the early decades of the twentieth century. Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the author of History Abolition and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (2018). He lives in Michigan with his wife Katy and dog Murphy.