Pierre Or, The Ambiguities

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, the third child of Maria and Allan Gansevoort Melvill. (The final e was added to the family name later.) His father’s financial difficulties and his early death while Melville was still a youth disrupted his formal education. Instead, Melville tried his hand at a variety of occupations before joining the crew of a merchant ship bound for England in 1839. Two years later he sailed to the South Seas aboard the whaler Acushnet. His early fiction, like the novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), drew upon and often embellished his exotic maritime adventures, earning him both popular and critical acclaim. But by the time he published Moby-Dick in 1851, his writing career was in decline, as both sales and praise of his works dwindled. Although he would subsequently publish two more novels and a number of short stories—including the masterpieces “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”—Melville spent the last three decades of his life primarily writing poetry. Largely forgotten at the time of his death on April 19, 1891, Melville, along with his unfinished novella Billy Budd, was rediscovered and his reputation revived in the early decades of the twentieth century. Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the general editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature and author, most recently, of The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. He lives in Ellicott City, Maryland. Cindy Weinstein is Vice Provost and Professor of English at California Institute of Technology. She is the author of Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe. She is co-editor of American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions and The Concise Companion to American Fiction, 1900-1950.