Herman Melville
Herman Melville, (1819-91). US novelist. He joined a merchant ship as a cabin boy in 1839 and later served on a whaler and a frigate. His adventures at sea included desertion to escape brutal treatment by one ship’s officers and involvement in a mutiny, for which he was imprisoned. These experiences influenced his first novel Typee (1846) and the story Billy Budd (unpublished until 1924). In 1850 he settled in Massachusetts, where he wrote his best-known novel Moby Dick (1851), the story of the mad Captain Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of a white whale. The novel was unsuccessful at the time and Melville died almost unknown.
