Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, for the last nineteen years of his working life, a federal government appointee. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, but his popularity declined precipitously after only a few years. By the time of his death, he had been almost completely forgotten. However, his longest novel, Moby-Dick — largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and most responsible for Melville's fall from favor with the contemporary reading public — was recognized in the 20th century as one of the chief literary masterpieces of both American and world literature.
The Life and Works of Herman Melville
Contemporary and 19th Century Melville Criticism
Arrowhead—The Home of Herman Melville
Physical description of Melville from his 1856 passport application
Melville's page at Literary Journal.com-research articles on Melville's works
Melville Room at the Berkshire Athenaeum
New Bedford Whaling Museum
The Melville Society
Works by Herman Melville at Project Gutenberg
Contemporary views on Herman Melville
Herman Melville Poet - The Poetry, Poems, and Prose-and-Verse Writings of Herman Melville
Persondata
NAME
Melville, Herman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION
American novelist, essayist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH
August 1, 1819(1819-08-01)
PLACE OF BIRTH
New York City
DATE OF DEATH
September 28, 1891
PLACE OF DEATH
New York City
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Categories: Herman Melville | American novelists | Scottish-Americans | Dutch Americans | American short story writers | American essayists | American poets | American travel writers | Moby-Dick | Cetologists | American sailors | American Presbyterians | American Unitarians | People from Albany, New York | People from New York City | People from Pittsfield, Massachusetts | 1819 births | 1891 deaths | LGBT literature in the United StatesHidden categories: Articles needing additional references from August 2008 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since May 2007
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Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, as the third child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. (After Allan died, Maria added an "e" to the surname.) Part of a well-established - if colorful - Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad doing business deals as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville, an honored survivor of the Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need. The maternal side of Melville's family was Hudson Valley Dutch. His maternal grandfather was General Peter Gansevoort, a hero of the battle of Saratoga; in his gold-laced uniform, the general sat for a portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart. The portrait appeared in Melville's later novel, Pierre, for Melville wrote out of his familial as well as his nautical background. Like the titular character in Pierre, Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent."
Herman's brother Thomas Melville was a governor of Sailors Snug Harbor.
Allan Melvill sent his sons to the New York Male School (Columbia Preparatory School). Overextended financially and emotionally unstable, Allan tried to recover from his setbacks by moving his family to Albany in 1830 and going into the fur business. The new venture ended in disastrous failure, and in 1832 Allan Melvill died of a sudden illness that included mental collapse, leaving his family in poverty. Although Maria had well-off kin, they were concerned with protecting their own inheritances and taking advantage of investment opportunities rather than settling their mother's estate so Maria's family would be more secure.
Melville attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, and again from October 1836 to March 1837, where he studied the classics.
Herman Melville's roving disposition and a desire to support himself independently of family assistance led him to seek work as a surveyor on the Erie Canal. This effort failed, and his brother helped him get a job as a cabin boy on a New York ship bound for Liverpool. He made the voyage, and returned on the same ship. Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) is partly based on his experiences of this journey.
Herman Melville
The succeeding three years (1837 to 1840) (voyage to Liverpool was 1839) were mostly occupied with school-teaching. Near the end of 1840, he once again decided to sign ship's articles. On January 3, 1841, he sailed from New Bedford, Massachusetts, on the whaler Acushnet, which was bound for the Pacific Ocean. The vessel sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific. Melville left very little direct information about the events of this 18-month voyage, although his whaling romance, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, probably gives many pictures of life aboard the Acushnet. Melville deserted the Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands in July 1842. For three weeks, he lived among the Typee natives, who were called cannibals by the two other tribal groups on the island, although they treated Melville very well. His book Typee describes a brief love affair with a beautiful native girl, Fayaway, who generally "wore the garb of Eden" and came to epitomize the guileless noble savage in the popular imagination, but we have no evidence of Melville's actual activities among the islanders.
Melville did not seem to be concerned about repercussions from his desertion of the Acushnet. He boarded another whaler bound for Hawaii and left that ship in Honolulu. After working as a clerk for four months he joined the crew of the frigate USS United States, which reached Boston in October 1844. These experiences were described in Typee, Omoo, and White Jacket, which were published as novels mainly because few believed their veracity.
Melville completed Typee in the summer of 1845, when he was only 26, although he had difficulty getting it published. It was eventually published, in 1846 in London, where it became an overnight bestseller. The Boston publisher subsequently accepted Omoo sight unseen. Typee and Omoo gave Melville overnight notoriety as a writer and adventurer and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he talks Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper". The novels, however, did not generate enough royalties for him to live on. Omoo was not as colorful as Typee, and readers began to realize Melville was not just producing adventure stories.
Redburn and White-Jacket had no problem finding publishers. In a letter to his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Melville dismissed both books as "two jobs which I have done for money—being forced to it as other men are to sawing wood". Mardi was a disappointment for readers who wanted another rollicking and exotic sea yarn.
Melville married Elizabeth Shaw (daughter of noted Massachusetts jurist Lemuel Shaw) on August 4, 1847. Elizabeth's father had been, early in his life, engaged to Melville's aunt, Nancy Melville; but she died before she and Shaw could marry. Melville and his wife honeymooned in Canada. They had four children, two sons and two daughters. In 1850, they purchased Arrowhead, a farm house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which is today a museum. Melville remained here for 13 years, occupied with his writing and managing his farm.
Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. were all present in August 1850 when a party including them and their Boston publisher James Thomas Fields climbed Monument Mountain in Great Barrington (where the group read aloud William Cullen Bryant’s poem Monument Mountain). Melville and Hawthorne thereafter became friends and influenced each others’ work while Hawthorne lived in Stockbridge at Tanglewood and Melville lived in Pittsfield. Melville was writing Moby Dick (dedicated to Hawthorne) and Hawthorne was writing The House of the Seven Gables.
Melville, something of an intellectual loner for most of his life, was tremendously inspired and encouraged by his new relationship with Hawthorne during the very period that he was writing one of the greatest works in the English language, Moby-Dick (dedicating it to Hawthorne), though their friendship was on the wane only a short time later, when he wrote Pierre there. However, these works did not achieve the popular and critical success of his earlier books. Following scathing reviews of Pierre by critics, publishers became wary of Melville's work. His publisher, Harper & Brothers, rejected his next manuscript, Isle of the Cross, which has been lost.
After 1851, sales of Melville’s work began to slow. He continued to live off royalties for the next two years, but by 1853, he was forced to pursue other means of income. For financial reasons, Melville was persuaded while in Pittsfield to enter what was for others the lucrative field of lecturing. From 1857 to 1860, he spoke at lyceums, chiefly on the South Seas. Turning to poetry, he gathered a collection of verse that failed to interest a publisher. By late 1860, however, Melville “had almost no income from magazines, lectures, or books.” Living almost entirely on the generosity of his father-in-law, he was in dire need of a job.
At the suggestion of his brother Allan, Melville pursued a consulship to Florence, Italy, hoping to escape likelihood of civil war for the European haven of art and culture. In an effort to secure this appointment, Melville used network of contacts and associations that ultimately linked him to Abraham Lincoln. His father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, then a former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, contacted Senator Charles Sumner, explaining that Melville “has suffered somewhat in his health, as his friends believe, by devotion to study and a life of extreme solitude.” Melville also spoke with Julius Rockwell, a neighbor in Pittsfield and a former U.S. Congressman and Senato, to write to Sumner. Rockwell agreed and urged Sumner to “let his genius—his imperfect health —…his noble wife, and his four children–plead, with trumpet tongues for him.”
Rockwell had contacts not only to Sumner, but to Lincoln himself, a fact Rockwell was cognizant of as he asked Sumner to “say to the President as much as you can in my name, which I trust he may remember with some kindness.” Lincoln’s regard for Rockwell grew as they served together as fellow Whigs in the 30th Congress to such a degree that, twelve years later,when Lincoln needed a small favor from a Massachusetts resident to facilitate his son’s entry into Harvard, Lincoln wrote to Rockwell, “I think of you more readily than any other citizen of Massachusetts, as one who would be willing to oblige me.”
Rockwell joined together with nine other prominent citizens of western Massachusetts to petition Lincoln on Melville’s behalf, stating: "We, the Undersigned, respectfully beg leave to recommend Mr. Herman Melville for the office of Consul at Florence. Mr. Melville has done much to enhance the reputation of our national literature; is a gentleman of the most estimable character, and is highly qualified for the post we earnestly recommend and request may be given him."
Melville himself went to Washington to make his case to Senator Sumner in person. On March 22, Melville attended a formal reception at the White House and wrote his wife about it: “A steady stream of two-&-two’s wound thro’ the apartments shaking hands with 'Old Abe' and immediately passing on…. Of course I was one of the shakers. Old Abe is much better looking than I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow–working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.”
Ultimately, Melville failed to get the appointment. On March 27, Lincoln named T. Bigelow Lawrence of Boston as Consul to Florence. Lawrence, son of former Minister to England and prominent Republican Abbott Lawrence, was a seasoned diplomat by 1861, having previously served as attaché to the U.S. Legation in London.
In 1863, he and his wife had resettled, with their four children, in New York City. After the end of the American Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), a collection of over seventy poems, which was generally panned by critics. His professional writing career was at an end and his marriage was unhappy when in 1867 his oldest son, Malcolm, shot himself, perhaps accidentally.
Melville eventually met with success in securing federal patronage. In 1867, the collector of customs for the port of New York, Henry Smythe, nominated Melville for the post of Inspector of Customs. President Andrew Johnson approved the nomination, and Melville began his new job on December 5, 1867. He earned $4 per day, worked six days per week, and served in the post for 19 years. (The customs house was ironically on Gansevoort St., which was named after his mother's prosperous family.)
In 1876, his uncle Peter Gansevoort, by a bequest, paid for the publication of Melville's massive epic poem, Clarel. Two volumes of poetry followed: John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891).
Melville died at his home in New York City early on the morning of September 28, 1891, age 72. The doctor listed "cardiac dilation" on the death certificate. His New York Times obituary mistakenly referred to him as "Henry Melville". He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
Obituaries cast him as a forgotten author:
"He won considerable fame as an author by the publication of a book in 1846 entitled Typee. ... This was his best work, although he has since written a number of other stories, which were published more for private than public circulation. ... During the ten years subsequent to the publication of this book he was employed at the New York Custom House." - New York Daily Tribune, September 29, 1891
"Of late years Mr. Melville - probably because he had ceased his literary activity - has fallen into a literary decline, as a result of which his books are little known. Probably, if the truth were known, even his own generation has long thought him dead, so quiet have been the later years of his life." - The Press, September 29, 1891.
From about age thirty-three, Melville ceased to be popular with a broad audience because of his increasingly philosophical, political and experimental literary tendencies. His novella Billy Budd, Sailor, unpublished at the time of his death, was published in 1924. Later it was turned into an opera by Benjamin Britten, a play and a film by Peter Ustinov.
In Herman Melville's Religious Journey, Walter Donald Kring detailed his discovery of letters indicating that Melville had been a member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. Until this revelation, little had been known of his religious affiliation. Parker in the second volume of his biography makes it clear that Melville became a nominal member only to placate his wife. He despised Unitarianism and its associated "ism", Utilitarianism. (The great English Unitarians were Utilitarians.) See the 2006 Norton Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man for more detail on Melville and religion than in Parker's 2002 volume.
Melville developed debilitating physical and psychiatric disorders in middle age after writing Moby Dick. Claims have been made over the years that Melville had bipolar affective disorder and alcoholism, or, alternatively, others have suggested that he may also have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Melville was active and vigorous in youth, but in middle age, he developed recurrent attacks of eye pain, photophobia and disabling low back pain. Melville's contemporaries usually attributed his physical problems to “neurasthenia” and many Melville biographers have often dismissed them as psychosomatic. However, Melville's clinical course, abnormally rigid posture, loss of 1 and 3/8 inches in height between the ages of 30 and 37, and a family history of rheumatological disease, suggest a possible diagnosis of ankylosing spondylitis.
Title page of the first U.S. edition of Moby-Dick, 1851.
Most of Melville's novels were published first in the United Kingdom and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences; at other times different printings were either bowdlerized or restored to their pre-bowdlerized state. (For specifics on different publication dates, editions, printings, etc., please see entries below under "Bibliography" for individual novels.)
Moby-Dick has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest literary works of all time. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, The Confidence-Man and many short stories and works of various genres.
Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until late in life. After the Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later. But again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. This may be the longest single poem in American literature. The poem, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut". In other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.
His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view. Clarel has won the admiration of no less a critic than Helen Vendler, who read it in preparation for the 1976 Pittsfield Centennial Celebration.
Throughout his lifetime, Melville was remembered chiefly for Typee and Omoo, which were then generally considered to be his best work. His later books were almost universally condemned as too dull, poorly written, or incoherently metaphysical to be read. After the publication of The Confidence-Man, in 1857, he was forgotten as a writer of verse, finally becoming so obscure that most of those who could remember him at all thought he was dead. In the later 1880s, near the end of his life, however, his reputation began to revive among a small circle of admirers, who were beginning to discuss Moby-Dick in addition to the Polynesian romances.
After the success of travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on misadventures in the merchant marine and navy, Melville's popularity declined dramatically. By 1876, all of his books were out of print. In the later years of his life and during the years immediately following his death, he was recognized, if at all, as only a minor figure in American literature.
Nineteenth century literary criticism of Melville's work was divergent and varied, but almost universally united in not considering Moby Dick to be a successful novel. Here are excerpts form critical overviews between 1853 and 1889 (This does not include consideration of Billy Budd, which was published posthumously, in 1924.)--
*It is no easy matter to pronounce which of Mr. Melville's books is the best. All of them (and he has published a goodly number, for so young an author) have had their own share of success, and their own peculiar merits, always saving and excepting Pierre--wild, inflated, repulsive that it is. Typee, the first and most successful of Mr. Melville's books, commands attention for the clearness of its narrative, the novelty of its scenery, and the simplicity of its style, in which latter feature it is a wondrous contrast to Mardi, Moby Dick, and Pierre.... White Jacket is a pure sea-book, but very clever. It is a clear, quiet picture of life on board of a man-of-war. It has less of Mr. Melville's faults than almost any of his works, and is distinguished for clear, wholesome satire, and a manly style. There is a scene describing the amputation of a sailor's leg by a brutal, cold-blooded surgeon, Patella, that Smollett might have painted. We would gladly quote it, but that it rather exceeds the limits usually afforded in an article so short as ours.... Mr. Melville does not improve with time. His later books are a decided falling off, and his last scarcely deserves naming; this however we scarce believe to be an indication of exhaustion. Just at present we believe the author of Pierre to be in this state of ferment. Typee, his first book, was healthy; Omoo nearly so; after that came Mardi, with its excusable wildness; then came Moby Dick, and Pierre with its inexcusable insanity… .Of his last book we would fain not speak, did we not feel that he is just now at that stage of author-life when a little wholesome advice may save him a hundred future follies. Let Mr. Melville stay his step in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it. He has peculiar talents, which may be turned to rare advantage. Let him diet himself for a year or two on Addison, and avoid Sir Thomas Browne, and there is little doubt but that he will make a notch on the American Pine. FITZ-JAMES O'BRIEN: OUR YOUNG AUTHORS -- MELVILLE. IN PUTNAM'S MONTHLY MAGAZINE (NEW YORK), FEBRUARY 1853
o select only a single work by Herman Melville, where shall we find an English picture of man-of-war life to rival his marvellous White-Jacket? Tastes and opinions of course vary, and there may be, and doubtless are, able and intelligent critics who will dissent from our verdict; but we may be permitted to say that we believe very few works of nautical fiction and narrative (by either English or American authors) exist, with which we are not familiar. His first books were Omoo and Typee, which quite startled and puzzled the reading world. The ablest critics were for some time unable to decide whether the first of these vivid pictures of life in the South Sea Islands was to be regarded as a mere dexterous fiction, or as a narrative of real adventures, described in glowing, picturesque, and romantic language; but when the second work appeared, there could no longer exist any doubt, that although the author was intimately acquainted with the Marquesas and other islands, and might introduce real incidents and real characters, yet that fiction so largely entered into the composition of the books, that they could not be regarded as matter-of-fact narratives. Both these works contain a few opening chapters, descriptive of foremast-life in whaling-ships, which are exceedingly interesting and striking. Melville's next work was entitled Redburn, and professed to be the autobiographical description of a sailor-boy's first voyage across the Atlantic. It contains some clever chapters, but very much of the matter, especially that portion relative to the adventures of the young sailor in Liverpool, London, &c., is outrageously improbable, and cannot be read either with pleasure or profit. This abortive work -- which neither obtained nor deserved much success -- was followed by Mardi; and a Voyage Thither. Here we are once more introduced to the lovely and mysterious isles of the vast Pacific, and their half-civilised, or, in some cases, yet heathen and barbarous aborigines. Next in order . . .came White Jacket; or the World in a Man-of-war. This is, in our opinion, his very best work. The last work we have to notice is a large one, entitled or The Whale, and it is quite as eccentric and monstrously extravagant in many of its incidents as even Mardi; but it is, nevertheless, a very valuable book, on account of the unparalleled mass of information it contains on the subject of the history and capture of the great and terrible cachalot, or sperm-whale. Those who have not read the work cannot have any conception of the reckless, inconceivable extravagancies to which we allude. Nevertheless, the work is throughout splendidly written, in a literary sense; and some of the early chapters contain what we know to be most truthful and superlatively-excellent sketches of out-of-the-way life and characters in connexion with the American whaling trade. He is never stupid, never dull; but, alas! he is often mystical and unintelligible -- not from any inability to express himself, for his writing is pure, manly English, and a child can always understand what he says, but the ablest critic cannot always tell what he really means; for he at times seems to construct beautiful and melodious sentences only to conceal his thoughts, and irritates his warmest admirers by his provoking, deliberate, willful indulgence in wild and half-insane conceits and rhapsodies. These observations apply mainly to his latter works, Mardi and The Whale, both of which he seems to have composed in an opium dream; for in no other manner can we understand how they could have been written. Such is Herman Melville! a man of whom America has reason to be proud, with all his faults; and if he does not eventually rank as one of her greatest giants in literature, it will be owing not to any lack of innate genius, but solely to his own incorrigible perversion of his rare and lofty gifts. A TRIO OF AMERICAN SAILOR-AUTHORS. IN DUBLIN UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE, JANUARY 1856
His two best works are, perhaps, Typee and Redburn. In the former, life among the savages is described in an almost idyllic style, too idyllic, it has been observed, to be wholly accurate. At least one may be permitted to doubt whether the savages of Typee were quite as interesting as Melville has represented them. The work itself and its successors attracted great attention at the time of their appearance, and although interest in them has since abated, they are still excellent in point of style. Melville is a writer of forcible and graceful English, although in some of his works he lapses into mysticism. JOHN S. HART: MELVILLE. FROM A MANUAL OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1872
In Typee, and Omoo, and Redburn, he takes other ground, and writes -- always with the finest fancy -- in a straight-headed way. I am concerned with him only as a seafarer. In Redburn he tells a sailor's yarn, and the dream-like figures of the crew of the Pequod make place for Liverpool and Yankee seamen, who chew tobacco and use bad language. His account of the sufferings of the emigrants in this book leaves a deep impression upon the mind. His accuracy is unimpeachable here, for the horrors he relates were as well known thirty and forty years ago as those of the middle passages were in times earlier still. In Omoo, again, he gives us a good deal of the sea, and presumably relates his own experiences on board a whaler. W. CLARK RUSSELL: SEA STORIES. IN CONTEMPORARY REVIEW (LONDON), SEPTEMBER 1884
In an age which has witnessed a marked revival of books of travel and adventure, and which, in its greed for narrative or fiction of this kind is often fain to content itself with works of a very inferior quality, it is a cause for regret that the author of Typee and Mardi should have fallen to a great extent out of notice, and should be familiar only to a small circle of admirers, instead of enjoying the wide reputation to which his undoubted genius entitles him. HENRY S. SALT: HERMAN MELVILLE. IN SCOTTISH ART REVIEW (EDINBURGH), NOVEMBER 1889
Real recognition and appreciation of Melville's works continued to be limited to a handful of scholars until the initiatives of Raymond Weaver, Michael Sadleir and Carl Van Doren culminated in the "Melville Revival" of the 1920s.
Soon after his death, there was a brief revival of interest in Melville's work. Many of them were published again and so were many appreciative scholarly evaluations. A second revival took place about 1919 coinciding with the centennial of his birth.
A confluence of publishing events in the 1920s brought about a major reassessment, now commonly called the "Melville Revival." The two books generally considered most important to the Revival were both brought forth by Raymond Weaver: his 1921 biography Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic and his 1924 version of Melville's last great but never quite finished or properly organized work, Billy Budd, which Melville's granddaughter gave to Weaver when he visited her for research on the biography. The other works that helped fan the Revival flames were Carl Van Doren's The American Novel (1921), D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and Lewis Mumford's biography, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Work (1929).
The English bibliographer and publisher Michael Sadleir compiled the first detailed Melville bibliography. He issued a volume of bibliographies titled Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, covering British writers such as Anthony Trollope, Marryat, Disraeli, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Whyte-Melville, Elizabeth Gaskell, with Melville as the only American author. In his foreword, Sadleir compared Melville favorably to the others, although he saw little commonality: "They are of Victorianism Victorian," while Melville "is of the ageless, raceless family of lonely giants." Sadleir was the driving force behind the first exhaustive edition, published 1922 – 1924, by Constable & Co Ltd. Works such as Billy Budd were thus generally available for the first time.
By the 1930s, Melville scholarship became prominent (Hugh W. Hetherington completed the first doctoral dissertation on Melville, at the University of Michigan in 1933), and, in 1947, a Melville Society was organized.
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Over the past 50 years, there has been an emerging interest concerning a perceived homo-erotic sub-text of Melville's writings. Potential homoerotic overtones have been interpreted in the early seafaring novels, from extended descriptions of the male beauty of the South Sea islanders to romanticised depictions of sailor friends, and comrades on board ship. In Moby Dick, male bonding has been interpreted in the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, as well as in the metaphoric "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter describing the camaraderie of sailors extracting spermaceti from a dead whale. Billy Budd, written at the very end of Melville's life, is considered both the most explicit and somber of his writings in terms of gay content. Billy, innocent and handsome, is destroyed by the evil and sexually repressed master-at-arms Claggert in a harsh and unforgiving world far removed from the simpler, idyllic paradise, described in the earlier South Sea novels.
Some critics have tried to draw a link between homo-eroticism in Melville's work and his private life; despite the fact that there is little hard evidence to verify or refute this claim. The writer W. Somerset Maugham claimed Melville had an 'eye for masculine beauty', and asserted this was due to "disappointment with the married state" and a repressed homosexuality. The poet W. H. Auden believed Melville tried to express his private feelings through the character of Billy Budd. Since Melville lived and died before the word 'homosexual' came into wider use, there is something plausible about Maugham's suspicion that Melville may have been perplexedly aware - in himself as well as others - of impulses for which there was no established language, and that Pierre was his attempt to write about them.
Collections
Uncollected or unpublished poems
The following essays were uncollected during Melville's lifetime:
