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Moby Dick: Or, the Whale

Name: Moby Dick: Or, the Whale
Author: Melville, Herman
ISBN: 9781406557138

by Melville, Herman

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Overview

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, and his popularity declined precipitously only a few years later. By the time of his death he had been almost completely forgotten, but his longest novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) - largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and most responsible for Melville's fall from favor with the reading public - was rediscovered in the 20th century as one of the chief literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until late in life. Other works include Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi and a Voyage Thither (2v/1849), Redburn: His First Voyage (1849), White-Jacket (1850), Pierre (1852), Israel Potter: Fifty Years of Exile (1855), The Piazza Tales (1856), Benito Cereno (1856), Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Timoleon (1891), The Apple-Tree Table (1922), John Marr and Other Poems (1922), The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1923), Billy Budd (1924), and Journal up the Straits (1935).

About the Author, Melville, Herman

Herman Melville

Herman Melville's legend is as mammoth and elusive as the whale that established it. The author's Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale stands as one of literature's greatest epics, a story of mythological proportions that was grounded in real life and a new way of storytelling. Melville's work, underappreciated in its time, remains as much subject to debate and interpretation as it was when he first caught the public eye with his South Seas adventure, Typee, in 1846.

Biography

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).