Herman Melville

Herman Melville went to sea at twenty, jumped ship in the Marquesas, lived with the islanders, and came home to write bestsellers about it. Moby-Dick, dedicated to Hawthorne, ended his popularity; the public wanted more South Seas and got a whale, a mad captain and the whole of creation. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York, wrote poetry no one read, and left Billy Budd in manuscript at his death in 1891, when the Times obituary got his name wrong. The twentieth century found Moby-Dick and made it the American epic.