Melville spent almost four years at sea on several different ships, at one point spending a month in the South Pacific with a Polynesian tribe called the Typee. There was also time in Tahiti, Honolulu and elsewhere, finally returning to Boston on October 3rd 1844. On his return, after encouragement from friends and family, he began writing a fictionalised account of his experiences with the Typee tribe. The book, Typee, was submitted in the summer of 1845 to Harper Brothers, who immediately rejected it on the grounds that it was “impossible it could be true”. The manuscript was eventually accepted by Wiley and Putnam, and appeared in February 1846. He followed it up with Omoo (the title is the transliteration of a Polynesian word meaning “wanderer”).
Omoo appeared in the spring of 1847. Melville was married in August 1847, to Elizabeth Shaw, and they moved to New York with Herman’s younger brother Allan and his new wife. From 1847 to 1849, Herman was very productive, writing most of Mardi, all of Redburn and White-Jacket, and in the first weeks of 1850 the first few chapters of a new book that would eventually metamorphose into Moby-Dick. Seafaring tales were popular at that time, and Melville’s books, especially the first two, were well received as part of that type. However with each succeeding book the reception was less positive, and indeed Melville himself was rather scathing about his own work. About Redburn he said “I, the author, know [it] to be trash, and wrote it to buy some tobacco with”. However, this was a fertile time creatively for Melville. As well as writing three novels, Melville was reading voraciously: “I have swam through libraries”, he said. He read Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Dante, Schiller, Thackeray and many others. It was also around this time that he met and became close friends with the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who supplied one of the few descriptive remarks we have about Melville as a man: he was apparently, though a gentleman, “a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen”.
Melville moved out of New York in the summer of 1850 and completed Moby Dick over the next year. It was published on November 14th 1851. Reviews were, to say the least, mixed. It was completely different from, and hugely more ambitious than, anything he had produced before. Readers hoping for a standard seafaring yarn would have been sorely disappointed. It almost sunk without trace in his lifetime — his lifetime earnings from it were a grand total of $556.37. Things got worse: his next novel Pierre was universally panned as was the vast majority of his subsequent work. He wrote almost no prose after 1853, the memorable exceptions being the compelling but strange novella Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and the late work Billy Budd (1889), which remained unpublished until 1924. He spent most of the last two decades of his life working for the United States Customs Service. He died on September 28, 1891, largely forgotten.
