Summary
American novelist, author of Moby-Dick, whose life and masterwork are the subject of essay 32 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, an introduction presenting him as the writer whose tremendous energies spill over national, aesthetic and historical boundaries (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.340-341).
Details
- Born in New York in 1819, the third child and second son of distinguished, extremely well-connected parents; the eight Melville children and their widowed mother endured financial uncertainty, displacement and constant anxiety (PDF p.340).
- His education was limited; he held clerical and school jobs, travelled across the country, and shipped aboard oceangoing vessels — in 1841 the whaler Acushnet, later other ships including the frigate United States — until 1844 (PDF p.340).
- He seems to have taken up professional writing largely because he had no other ready way of earning a living; his first books, Typee, Omoo and Mardi, were largely accounts of his Pacific travels (PDF p.340-341).
- He married, fathered a child in 1849, began Moby-Dick the same year and completed it in the latter part of 1851; it had only muted success, though he continued writing until his death in 1891, admired by Hawthorne (to whom Moby-Dick is dedicated) and Longfellow; the book did not return to a sustained presence for a large audience until the mid-1920s (PDF p.341).
- His biographers Leon Howard, Newton Arvin and Michael Paul Rogin stress the irreducibly American quality of his life and work (PDF p.341).
- Said pairs him with Joseph Conrad: both restless writers whose explorations of peripheral regions were risky voyages away from routine and investigations of the limits of their worlds, their most radical work a challenge to stable identity itself (PDF p.342).
- He began Moby-Dick as a tale depending on his youthful whaling experiences; a subterranean theme then took him over — the second Moby-Dick — and the present text is a grafting and rewriting of the two versions, with irregularities never completely taken care of (PDF p.343).
- His review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, written while at work on Moby-Dick, asserts America’s cultural independence, quoted: “no American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American.” (PDF p.348).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Moby-Dick, Joseph Conrad