Fiction Writer and Poet

Early Life. The son of a merchant who specialized in French imports, Herman Melvill (he would add the e as a young man) was sharply affected by his father's business failure and his apparently suicidal death in 1832. Melvill tried his hand at several occupations, finally choosing to go to sea in 1839 as a crew member on the St. Lawrence. In 1841 he shipped out as a common seaman on the whaling ship Acushnet, bound for the South Seas, but never completed that voyage; instead he and a friend deserted ship at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands and began a two-year adventure that included a month spent with the cannibalistic natives of the Taipi valley, service on an Australian whaler, imprisonment in Tahiti as a suspected mutineer, and working in Hawaii. In August 1843 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy at Honolulu...