1851, Melville

The photo above depicts Melville in 1861.

A Grade School Education
Herman Melville was 12 years old in 1831, when his family took him out of school. One year later, his father died suddenly, leaving his family with massive debts.

"A Whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard"
At the age of 20, Melville served as a cabin boy on a ship that traveled to and from Liverpool, and at age 21, he spent over a year at sea on a whaler bound for the South Seas.

"The Man Who Lived Among Cannibals"
In 1842, Melville and a shipmate abandoned ship in the Marquesas Islands and for a few weeks he "lived among the supposedly cannibalistic islanders of Tapait Valley" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1154). 

After his return to the United States, he was living with his brother in New York City when he wrote Typee, a novel inspired by his experiences in the Marquesas Islands. Published in 1846, the book was a best-seller, and he followed up a year later with Omoo, another best-seller inspired by his experiences in the South Seas.

As a result of these successes, Melville was known as the "man who lived among the cannibals" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1157). 

The Price of Literary Ambitions
Melville's third novel, Mardi, published in 1849, was much longer and more difficult than his first two novels. It was panned by critics and did not sell well.

Melville wrote two more popular novels published in 1849 and 1850 that were based on his experiences at sea.

With Moby-Dick, published in 1851, Melville attempted to bring together his successes writing about life at sea and his ambitions to write more challenging, ambitious literature. Critical reception was mixed.

"Crazy"
A year later, his next novel, Pierre, published in 1852, was condemned by  as "the work of a maniac" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1156).

Obscurity
Throughout the rest of the decade, he wrote short fiction that paid little and novels that were not as popular as his earlier works. During the Civil War, he wrote poems that were "barely noticed by reviewers" (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1156).

When he died in 1881, his obituary in the New York Times was brief and it misspelled the title of the novel that he would become best known for ("Mobie Dick").

Posthuous Revival
In the 1920s, "the neglected Melville suddenly came to be regarded in the rarefied company of Shakespeare'"  (Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 1157).