Herman Melville books

Anthologies

Short Stories/Novellas

Short Story Collections

Standalone Novels

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. His father died when he was twelve, leaving the family in financial difficulty. He took to sea in his early twenties, shipping out to the Pacific on a whaling vessel. The experience gave him the raw material for most of his career – he deserted ship in the Marquesas Islands, lived among Polynesian islanders, sailed on other vessels, and eventually joined the US Navy.

His first two novels, “Typee” (1846) and “Omoo” (1847), drew directly from his time in the South Pacific. Both sold well and made him briefly famous as a writer of sea adventures. He followed with “Redburn” and “White-Jacket,” both based on his experiences at sea. Then came “Moby Dick” in 1851, a novel he had worked on intensively while corresponding with his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne. The book baffled reviewers and sold only around 3,000 copies in his lifetime. “Pierre” (1852) fared even worse.

After these disappointments, Melville turned to shorter fiction. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” appeared in a magazine in 1853 – a strange story about a copyist who refuses all requests with the phrase “I would prefer not to.” “Benito Cereno,” published in 1855, is a tense novella about a slave revolt at sea. Both are now widely taught in universities. Melville spent his later decades working as a customs inspector in New York. “Billy Budd” was found among his papers after he died in 1891, unfinished, and was published in 1924.