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Circa 1846 – 47 Photo by Asa Twichell –

Top 10 Interesting Facts about Herman Melville.

Herman Melville was born on August  1819 in New York City. He was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet, best known for his sea-themed novels including Moby Dick (1851).

As a child, Melville was full of imagination and had a creative mind.

Melville’s father was extremely successful, therefore giving Melville an advantage in life at an early age. His father passed shortly after the downfall of his company when Melville was just 12.

Consequently, he had to get multiple jobs to provide for his now-poor family.

He attended a strict New York High School and, ironically, struggled at a young age to read and write He had difficulty gaining the approval of family members.

Regardless of the negative feedback towards Melville himself, he never gave up trying to win the acknowledgement and acceptance of his family.

 At 20 years old, he went on his first journey across the sea; this was the start of his significant inspiration for years to come. Let’s dive into 10 interesting facts about Herman Melville.

1. During Herman Melville’s lifetime, Moby Dick was a Flop.

Scanned cover  of Moby Dick Novel by Louis Zansky-

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick holds a very important place in English literature. A survey of 100 authors from 54 countries named the novel as one of the 100 best books of all time, alongside Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

When Moby Dick debuted in 1851 reviewers trashed it. Many argued that it wasn’t even one of Melville’s best books.

Between 1863 and 1887, Moby Dick sold an average of 23 copies each year. An acknowledged classic sells more copies each year than were sold in the entire19th  century.

 Moby Dick has been made into a film several times, with the first being a silent movie from 1926 called The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore as Captain Ahab.

2.      Herman Melville’s Family added an ‘E’ to their Original Name

His mother Maria Gansevoort descended from one of the first Dutch families in New York, and his father Allan Melville came from old Boston stock thus their family had pedigree.

Allan declared bankruptcy in 1830 and died two years later, leaving Maria with eight children under the age of 17 and a pile of debt from loans and Allan’s unsuccessful businesses. His father, Allan Melvill, died penniless after a lifetime of fantasizing about his noble ancestry.

 Melville’s mother and oldest son decided together to add the “e” to the family name to distance themselves from Melvill’s reputation.

Perhaps the reason was to hide from collection agencies or a creative unlikely way to avoid creditors.

3.      Melville was also a Poet.

Although he’s better known for his fiction, Melville has an interesting poetic claim to fame.

His 1876 work Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land is the longest published poem in American literature.

It is almost 18,000 lines, putting it a fair way ahead of Paradise Lost with its 10,000 lines. Clarel was published in two volumes nearly 20 years after Melville had given up publishing fiction.

Though his poetry is read less frequently, critics argue that it too is historically significant, thematically complex, and highly crafted

He is described as the third participant in the mid-19th-century American poetic revolution,” along with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

In fact, Melville spent the last decades of his life writing poetry. His published collections include Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866),  an intimate and highly personal response to the Civil War, and the allegorical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (6).

4. Herman Melville Struggled to get a Job.

A ship and its crew  Photo by on

His family struggled with poverty after the death of his father in 1832 after having already experienced the failure of the family import business two years earlier.

Melville ended up spending much of his young adulthood working on ocean voyages, being unable to find lucrative work on the land.

Things were compounded by the national financial crisis in 1837 which made it difficult for Melville to find a permanent job, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

He served as a bank clerk, teacher, land surveyor and crew member on a packet ship.

in 1841 he signed onto the whaler Acushnet of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Further, he served aboard a few different whalers and rose to the role of the harpooner.

His adventures at sea inspired Moby-Dick.

5.Melville lived with Polynesians for Several Weeks after Deserting his Ship.

Polynesian rowers by JayH –

Melville and the Acushnet’s captain didn’t get along and when the ship reached the Marquesas Islands, Melville and a friend Richard Tobias Greene hid in the forests until the ship departed .

They spent a month living with the Pacific Islander.

He also found reason to criticize European attempts to civilize the islanders by converting them to Christianity.

Melville drew on his South Pacific experiences in his first two novels, which became runaway bestsellers: Typee and Omoo.

They lived in the Typee valley for up to a month, but the book’s tales were long ago revealed as wildly exaggerated.

However, Melville always defended the veracity of his book, even appending to later editions a testimony from his shipmate ascertaining the contents as true.

The appearance of truth was assisted by the author’s extensive and shameless plagiarism of ethnographic detail from other sources (notably William Ellis’ Polynesian Researches). 

6. Mount Greylock was Herman Melville’s Muse.

Mt. Greylock by protophobic –

In his study, he set up his writing desk so he could look out the north-facing window, which perfectly framed the summit of Mount Greylock, Massachusetts’s tallest mountain.

While he wrote, a snowcapped Mount Greylock, resembling a white whale breaching the surface, was always with him. Melville simply loved the mountain, as he would dedicate Moby Dick to it, calling it “my own more immediate sovereign lord and king.”

It was a poetic and loving exchange between a writer who had worked on whaling ships and the mountain he could see from his study.

The book would become an instant failure but would live on as an American classic.

7. Melville Fictionalised Whaling Ship Essex’s Disaster.

While on the Acushnet, Melville had learned about an infamous shipwreck from the son of one of its survivors. In November 1820, a massive sperm whale had attacked and sunk the whaleship Essex of Nantucket in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Its crew, stranded in three small boats with little food or water, chose to drift more than 4000 miles to South America instead of 1200 miles to the Marquesas Islands thinking they would be eaten by the natives.

 Ironically, some of the castaways ended up eating their dead shipmates to survive.

Melville used the disaster to form the climax of Moby-Dick, in which the Pequod of Nantucket is destroyed by the white whale. Melville only visited Nantucket after Moby Dick was published.

He interviewed the Essex’s captain, George Pollard, who had survived the terrible ordeal and become the town’s night watchman.

8.      Herman Melville’s Last Work Was Discovered by Accident.

Theatrical poster for the film  (1962) by Reynold Brown-

During the 100 year commemoration of Melville’s birth renewed interest in his novels and poems, most of which were long out of print by then.

Raymond Weaver, a literature professor at Columbia University working on the first major biography of Melville, collaborated with Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Melville’s granddaughter and literary executor, who gave him access to the author’s papers.

While going through letters and notes Weaver discovered the unfinished manuscript of Billy Budd in a tin breadbox.

Melville had started to write the short story about a tragic sailor but had not completed it by his death in 1891.

 Weaver edited and published the story in 1924. Many scholars hailed Billy Budd as Melville’s final masterpiece.

9. Berkshire Athenaeum holds Herman Melville’s  Memorabilia.

Berkshire Athenaeum  Pittsfield, Massachusetts by Daderot –
 

Also available are first editions of his work and a full library of books about him.

The atheneum holds priceless objects owned by or associated with the author.

The Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield holds the world’s largest collection of Melville memorabilia (Melvilliana). 

Fans can geek out over the earliest known portrait of Melville painted in 1848, carved wooden canoe paddles that he collected in Polynesia, his walking stick, his favourite inkstand, quills, and a collection of scrimshaw, maps, and prints;

On display are Elizabeth Melville’s writing desk and a section of the first successful transatlantic cable, which Melville valued as a prized souvenir.

Finally, you will see the actual breadbox in which Billy Budd had been hiding.

10. A Whale Fossil is Named after Melville.

Leviathan melvillei, a giant toothed whale, is described in a new paper, published online June 29 in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

The researchers have studied one specimen’s fossil remains consisting of several teeth and portions of the jaw.

From this, the team estimates that the skull would have been at least three meters long and the body longer than 13 meters.

The newly described beast lived some 12 million to 13 million years ago and was first discovered two years ago in modern-day Peru.

The teeth of this raptorial whale were enormous, measuring more than 36 centimetres long.

The authors of the study, led by Olivier Lambert of Department de Paleontologie at the Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique in Brussels, hypothesize that the L. melvillei would have been a fearsome predator on the high Miocene seas, eating prey including baleen whales.

 This shapes up to be a very different feeding strategy and diet than today’s sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus), which have many smaller teeth, though a larger literary reputation.

Herman Melville is the author of “Moby-Dick”, the novel about a gigantic whale. On the contrary, had a truly adventurous life in the course of which he had his ups and downs.

He passed on as one of the most unknown authors but his works came again and had major success.

Despite not gaining major success during his lifetime and receiving harsh criticism, Herman Melville remains one of the most important American novelists.

Herman Melville died in September 1891. The legacy that he left is truly significant to worldwide literature.