HERMAN MELVILLE

Melville returned to civilian life a romantic hero who had lived among cannibals and traveled the world.. one of the first white men to travel to the islands of the South Seas... In 1847

Herman Melville

•worked several jobs

including bank clerk, retail sales, farming, and

teaching

-at the age of 17, Melville shipped out to sea as a

cabin boy

-four years wandering and collecting memories that furnished the material for the rest of his career

South Seas on the whaler

Acushnet

18-month voyage basis for his most famous book,

Moby Dick

-jumped ship at the

Marquesas (French

Polynesia & Survivor site)

-exotic adventures in Typee and Mardi,

-held captive by savages

-escaped on an Australian

trader

-Jumped ship again in

Tahiti

-worked as a field laborer depicted native life in

Omoo

agreed philosophically with Rousseau's idea of "the

Noble Savage."

virtues of the primitive

man set against the

missionaries' narrow way of life

Next traveled to Honolulu

Melville returned to civilian

life a romantic hero who had lived among cannibals and

traveled the world

(one of the first white men

to travel to the islands of

the South Seas)

On the other hand, he drew much criticism

Like Rousseau, M believed

that missionaries ruined the natural joy, exuberance, and innocence of native peoples

In 1847 Melville married

Elizabeth, the daughter of the Chief Justice of

Massachusetts -visited

England and Paris, and

moved his family to the

farm Arrowhead, where

they would live for the next thirteen years

friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived

nearby at Lenox

wrote Moby Dick, which he

dedicated to Hawthorne

In 1856, M went to the

Holy Land

- south-sea wanderings rep the perfect in the physical realm

- viewed the land of Israel

as the center of Western

spirituality

His life from this point

would be an attempt to

reconcile the physical with the spiritual

-The Civil War provided

material for expressing his inner conflict

- a mirror image of the

greater external one taking place on battlefields across the South

Southern poets like Catholic priest Abram Joseph Ryan

(the Confederacy's poet

laureate), William Gilmore

Simms, and Henry Timrod,

Walt Whitman and Herman

Melville are the poets of the

"Civil War."

M ignored because of his

politics, even though

Melville is arguably a better poet than Whitman

Melville questioned deeply the democratic faith and

the union

Thus, opposing Lincoln’s

ideas M the war poet had doomed himself to

obscurity

-lectured on the South Seas and on Roman Statuary to supplement income

- after failing to receive an appointment for a

consulship, he completely

withdrew from society

Melville moved his family to New York, but he passed

entirely out of the public

eye

Like many American

authors, Melville did not

receive the recognition he deserved in his lifetime

Although famous in Eng,

Am ignored him until the 1920s when books about the South Seas suddenly came into vogue

Melville's writing: sense of

a constant struggle

between good and evil,

liberty and chance, and the known and unknown

Today, Melville is truly

regarded as one of the

American literary greats