Herman Melville
American novelist · 1819–1891
Who is Herman Melville?
Herman Melville was an American novelist whose youthful years as a sailor in the South Pacific supplied the material for his earliest and, at the time, most commercially successful books. In 1842 he jumped ship at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands and lived briefly among the Typee people, an experience that became his first novel, Typee (1846). He subsequently sailed to Tahiti, where a shipboard mutiny led to his brief imprisonment in the Papeete "calabooza," or jail, before he continued traveling through the Society Islands. These experiences became the basis of his second book, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), which combined travel narrative with sharp, often critical observations of colonial and missionary influence on Tahitian life. Melville's Pacific books made him a popular author in his twenties, a fame that later gave way to relative obscurity following the poor initial reception of his masterwork, Moby-Dick (1851). His South Seas writings remain important early literary documents of 19th-century Tahiti as seen through a foreign sailor's eyes.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Herman Melville" (biographical summary) · Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), full text · Smithsonian Magazine, "How a Voyage to French Polynesia Set Herman Melville on the Course to Write Moby-Dick"