During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.įrom that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including ' Benito Cereno' and ' Bartleby, the Scrivener'. Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits.

The Happy Failure by Herman Melville