Herman Melville

Herman Melville was an American writer and sailor.

He was born in New York. When he was 12, his father, a merchant, died, leaving debts behind and forcing Melville to give up the idea of a university education. From the age of 18 he sailed as a cabin boy on a packet ship, then worked for some time as a teacher; in 1841 he set out for the South Seas aboard the whaler Acushnet. A year and a half later, after a conflict with the boatswain of the Acushnet, Melville deserted the ship near the Marquesas Islands and was taken prisoner by the natives, then freed by the crew of an American warship. After three years of wandering, he returned to his homeland to pursue a literary career.

His novels based on his own experience, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, which brought the writer immediate fame (Typee was Melville’s most popular book during his lifetime), are marked by a turn toward the exotic and a complete rejection of the reality familiar to readers. Melville leads his hero into a primitive world, to the savages of the South Seas, untouched by civilization. Behind the adventurous plots lies a problem that troubled not only Melville: can one, having renounced civilization, return to nature?

The allegorical novel Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, about a voyage as a philosophical search for the Absolute, was not a success.

In his next works, still drawing on personal experience, Melville sought to analyze the surrounding reality and social relations. He wrote Redburn: His First Voyage and White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. White-Jacket depicts the cruelty and brutality of the military of the author’s day.

However, Melville turned away from realistic sea novels and created his greatest masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. He proclaimed the primacy of the irrational. In Moby-Dick, Melville demonstrates the irrational nature of social relations; he depicts a fantastically bleak reality ruled by the mysterious white whale named Moby Dick, whom almost no one has seen, but who makes his presence known through the “results of his actions.” Moby Dick rules over everything; according to rumors