MELVILLE, HERMAN (1819-1891), American author, was born in New York city on Aug. 1, 1819. He shipped as a cabin boy at the age of 18, thus being enabled to make his first visit to England, and at 22 sailed for a long whaling cruise in the Pacific. After a year and a half he deserted his ship at the Marquesas islands on account of the cruelty of the captain ; was captured by cannibals on the island of Nukahiva, and detained, without hardship, four months; was rescued by the crew of an Australian vessel, which he joined, and two years later reached New York. Thereafter, with the exception of a passenger voyage round the world in 186o, Melville remained in the United States, devoting himself to literature—though for a considerable period he held a post in the New York custom house—and being perhaps Hawthorne's most intimate friend among the liter ary men of America. His writings are numerous, and of varying merit; his verse, patriotic and other, is forgotten, and his works of fiction and of travel are of irregular execution.
Nevertheless, few authors have been enabled so freely to in troduce romantic personal experiences into their books ; in his first work, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, or Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas (1846), he described his escape from the cannibals ; while in Omoo, a Narrative of Adven tures in the South Seas (1847), White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (185o), and Moby Dick, or The White Whale (1851), he portrayed seafaring life and character with vigour and originality, and from a personal knowledge equal to that of Cooper, Marryat or Clark Russell. But these records of adventure
were followed by other tales so turgid, eccentric, opinionative, and loosely written as to seem the work of another author. He died in New York on Sept. 28, 1891.