Herman Melville's (1819-91) father's bankruptcy and death in 1832
deprived him of higher-educational oppotunities and alienated him
forever from a conventional view of life.He taught school, sailed
to Liverpool and back, then shipped before the mast on a Pacific
whaling voyage. He deserted at the Marquesas Islands, living for a
month among the cannibal Typee natives. An Australian whaleship
then took him to Tahiti, where he was jailed for mutiny, but he
escaped and spent some months as a beachcomber. A third whaleship
took him to Hawaii, where he lived for some months before sailing
home with the crew of the frigate United States. From these
adventures came his popular and increasingly imaginative travel
romances- Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), the allegorical Mardi (1849),
Redburn (1849), White-Jacket (1850), and his masterpiece, Moby-Dick
(1851). Melville married in 1847. His later works of fiction were
not sea romances and sold poorly. He gave up professional writing
and for twenty years served as a customs inspector in New York,
where he died. Billy Budd, written in his last years, was published
for the first time in 1924, on the crest of a Melville revival that
began about 1920 and continues to the present day-a revival that
has established him among the greatest American writers.
Elizabeth Renker teachesEnglish at Ohio State University. She is
the author ofStrike through the Mask- Herman Melville and the Scene
of Writing.
Christopher Buckley is a widely published essayist and the author
of fifteen books, including Thank Your for Smoking and Losing Mum
and Pup. At eighteen, he worked his way around the world as a
deckboy aboard a Norwegian merchant ship. His first book was
Steaming to Bamboola- The World of a Tramp Freighter, and he has
crossed the Atlantic twice aboard a sailboat and the Pacific once.
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