The year 2019 is witnessing a double feting of Herman Melville. The author was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, and we mostly know of him now because he was plucked from the ranks of obscurity in 1919, when the literary commodity that was Herman Melville was rediscovered in all of its posthumous glory. Melville’s centennial began a journey that the author himself didn’t take in his own lifetime.
Melville knew a first flush of success with the publication of his first two works, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). The books arose from Melville not really knowing what to do with his life, someone suggesting that he take to the sea, and young Herman doing just that, then fictionalizing a lot of what he saw. These were travelogue novels, lanky on plot, with deep-focus observations spruced up with hyperbole, such that Melville became in hot demand as “the man who lived with cannibals.” They sold well, but Melville—as with all his writing admired by either the public or the critics—felt sickened, a perpetrator of a sham, an artist who had sold out. (His friend Nathaniel Hawthorne would watch this struggle within Melville over the years, certain that the younger author was incapable of achieving a state of contentment in his life or work.)
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