Herman Melville

Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, a long novel of the whaleship Pequod and Captain Ahab's pursuit of a white whale, was published in London in October 1851 and in New York in November 1851. It draws on his own time at sea: the National Archives holds the Acushnet crew list showing that he signed on as a greenhand in December 1840 and left the ship at Nuku Hiva in July 1842. American reviews at the time were mostly favourable, and the book's standing as his major work grew in the 1920s revival.

Melville's first two books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were narratives of his years in the Pacific. The London publisher John Murray bought the English rights to Typee for 100 pounds, and the New York firm Wiley and Putnam published it simultaneously. By the start of 1849 Wiley and Putnam had sold 6,392 copies in the United States, and reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic took notice of both books.

After 1853 Melville turned to shorter forms and verse. Bartleby, the Scrivener appeared in a magazine in late 1853 and the Piazza Tales, a collection of his magazine stories, in 1856. His first book of poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, was published by Harper and Brothers in 1866, and the long poem Clarel, a roughly 20,000-line poem based on his 1856-57 journey to the Holy Land, followed in 1876.

Melville finished Billy Budd, Foretopman five months before his death in 1891, but it remained unpublished until Raymond Weaver's 1924 edition of Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, prepared from the manuscripts that Weaver located with the help of Melville's granddaughter. The edition was part of the first collected edition of his works.

While writing Moby-Dick in 1850 and 1851, Melville also ran a farm at Pittsfield. His wife's journal, quoted by Weaver and Mumford, records that he would sit at his desk all day, ride to the village after dark, and be up early walking before breakfast. In June 1851 he wrote to Hawthorne that he planned to go to New York to 'work and slave' on the book while it went through the press.

Keeping a long writing routine alongside farm work, as his wife recorded it, is consistent with discipline; the evidence is largely family and self-report, so the reading stays modest. Discipline

As book sales fell after 1853, Melville looked for other income. Dana, Allan Melville and Hawthorne all backed his unsuccessful bid for a Pacific consulship in 1853. From 1857 to 1860 he lectured, giving fewer than thirty lectures at fees of about fifty dollars, and in 1858 wrote that he would lecture 'in Labrador or on the Isle of Desolation off Patagonia'. On 5 December 1866 he took a post as inspector of customs in New York, which he held for about twenty years.

Moving from writing to lecturing and then to a steady civil post as his income fell is consistent with adaptability; the sources describe the changes but not his reasons. Adaptability

After the success of Typee and Omoo, Melville published Mardi in April 1849, a Polynesian allegory. In its preface he said the book began as a test of whether a romance might be taken for fact after his two earlier narratives were doubted. Reviews, enthusiastic at first, grew hostile through 1849, and he wrote that the London Athenaeum had 'cut into' it and the Boston Post had 'burnt' it, adding that such attacks were 'matters of course'. His next books, Redburn and White-Jacket, returned to his sea experience, but Moby-Dick and Pierre followed.

Following two popular travel books with an allegory that readers and reviewers received poorly is consistent with independent thinking, and it cost him part of his audience. Independent Thinking