Herman Melville

Herman Melville

In 1850 while writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's publisher introduced him to another writer who was in the midst of a novel. This was Herman Melville, the book Moby Dick. Hawthorne and Melville became good friends at once, for despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they had a great deal in common. Melville was a New Yorker, born in 1819, one of eight children of a merchant of distinguished lineage. His father, however, lost all his money and died when the boy was 12. Herman left school at 15, worked briefly as a bank clerk, and in 1837 went to sea. For 18 months, in 1841 and 1842, he was crewman on the whaler Acushnet. Then he jumped ship in the South Seas. For a time he lived among a tribe of cannibals in the Marquesas. Later he made his way to

Tahiti where he idled away nearly a year. After another year at sea he returned to America in the fall of 1844.

Although he had never before attempted serious writing, in 1846 he published Typee an account of his life in the Marquesas. The book was a great success, for Melville had visited a part of the world almost unknown to

Americans, and his descriptions of his bizarre experiences suited the taste of a romantic age.

As he wrote Melville became conscious of deeper powers. In 1849 he began a systematic study of Shakespeare, pondering the bard's intuitive grasp of human nature. Like Hawthorne, Melville could not accept the prevailing optimism of his generation. Unlike his friend, he admired Emerson, seconding the Emersonian demand that Americans reject European ties and develop their own literature.

"Believe me," he wrote, "men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio." Yet he considered Emerson's vague talk about striving and the inherent goodness of mankind complacent nonsense.

Experience made Melville too aware of the evil in the world to be a transcendentalist. His novel Redburn based on his adventures on a Liverpool packet, was, as the critic F. O. Matthiessen put it, "a study in disillusion, of innocence confronted with the world, of ideals shattered by facts." Yet

Melville was no cynic; he expressed deep sympathy for the Indians and for immigrants, crowded like animals into the holds of transatlantic vessels. He denounced the brutality of discipline in the United States Navy in White-Jacket.

His essay The Tartarus of Maids, a moving if somewhat overdrawn description of young women working in a paper factory, protested the subordination of human beings to machines.