Herman Melville, 1819–1891
Biographical note
Novelist, born in New York, and took to the sea, which led to strange adventures, including an imprisonment of some months in the hands of cannibals in the Marquesas Islands. His first novel, Typee [1846], is based upon this experience. Omoo followed in 1847, Moby Dick, or the White Whale, a powerful sea story, in 1852, and Israel Potter in 1855. He was a very unequal writer, but occasionally showed considerable power and originality.
[From A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature by John W. Cousin, 1910]
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Works
Novels
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life [1846]- Omoo: A Narrative of the South Seas [1847]
- Mardi: And a Voyage Thither [1849]
- Redburn: His First Voyage [1849]
- White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War [1850]
Moby Dick; or the Whale [1851]- Pierre: or, The Ambiguities [1852]
- Isle of the Cross (ca. 1853, since lost)[31]
- Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile [1856]
- The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade [1857]
Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative [1924]
Short stories
- "The Piazza" [1856]
- "Bartleby the Scrivener"
- "Benito Cereno"
- "The Lightning-Rod Man"
- "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles"
- "The Bell-Tower"
- "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December 1853)
- "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June
1854)
- "The Happy Failure" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, July 1854)
- "The Fiddler" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, September 1854)
- "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (Harper's New Monthly
Magazine, April 1855)
- "Jimmy Rose" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November 1855)
- "The 'Gees" (Harper's New Monthly Magazine, March 1856)
- "I and My Chimney" (Putnam's Monthly Magazine, March 1856)
- "The Apple-Tree Table" (Putnam's Monthly Magazine, May 1856)
- "The Two Temples"
- "Daniel Orme"