Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York City. After his father’s bankruptcy and death he went to sea — on a merchant ship, then on whalers in the Pacific — and turned the experience into the early successes Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Moby-Dick (1851) was a commercial failure; after Pierre and The Confidence-Man his reputation faded and he worked for nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York, writing poetry. Billy Budd was left in manuscript at his death and published in 1924, by which time his rediscovery had begun.