He wrote perhaps a dozen poems of distinction, most of them brief and the outgrowth of his travels or his musings on the events of the Civil War. It can be argued that his last published prose work,
The Confidence-Man, is the first modern American novel. Without doubt, it is an uncanny tour de force.
Because so much of it appears in his writing, the study of Melville's life has more than ordinary interest. Early and conspicuously autobiographical novels like Omoo he prefaces with an assertion that "he has merely described what he has seen." White-Jacket, he states, is an account of his "man-of-war experiences and observations." But more and more, as he became landlocked, his books grew to be inside narratives, the voyages of a mental traveler. So, in addition to the obvious biographical facts, a more difficult study, that of Melville's mind and spirit, should be pursued, and it should embrace not only his psychological and intellectual history but his responses, frequently deviant and always ambivalent, to nineteenth-century American culture.
Melville's father, Allan, an "importer of French Goods and Commission Merchant" who traveled abroad, was a member of a substantial if colorful Boston family.
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