In 1850, while Hawthorne was writing The House of the Seven Gables, his publisher introduced him to another writer who was in the midst of a novel. The writer was Herman Melville and the book, Moby-Dick. Hawthorne and Melville became good friends at once, for despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they had a great deal in common. Melville was a New Yorker, born in 1819, one of eight children of a merchant of distinguished lineage. His father, however, lost all his money and died when the boy was twelve. Herman left school at fifteen, worked briefly as a bank clerk, and in 1837 went to sea. For eighteen months, in 1841 and 1842, he was crewman on the whaler Acushnet. Then he jumped ship in the South Seas. For a time he lived among a tribe of cannibals in the Marquesas; later he made his way to Tahiti, where he idled away nearly a year. After another year at sea he returned to America in the fall of 1844.
Although he had never before attempted serious writing, in 1846 he published Typee, an account of his life in the Marquesas. The book was a great success, for Melville had visited a part of the world almost unknown to Americans, and his descriptions of his bizarre experiences suited the taste of a romantic age. Success inspired him to write a sequel, Omoo (1847); other books followed quickly.
Experience made Melville too aware of the evil in the world to be a transcendentalist. His dark view of human nature culminated in Moby-Dick (1851). This book, Melville said, was “broiled in hellfire.” Against the background of a whaling voyage (no better account of whaling has ever been written), he dealt subtly and symbolically with the problems of good
Walt Whitman
And evil, of courage and cowardice, of faith, stubbornness, and pride. In Captain Ahab, driven relentlessly to hunt down the huge white whale Moby Dick, which had destroyed his leg, Melville created one of the great figures of literature; in the book as a whole, he produced one of the finest novels written by an American, comparable to the best in any language.
As Melville’s work became more profound, it lost its appeal to the average reader, and its originality and symbolic meaning escaped most of the critics. Moby-Dick, his masterpiece, received little attention and most of that unfavorable. He kept on writing until his death in 1891 but was virtually ignored. Only in the 1920s did the critics rediscover him and give him his merited place in the history of American literature. His “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” now considered one of his best stories, was not published until 1924.
World History
