Herman Melville

Born 1 August 1819 · Died 28 September 1891

From Manhattan, New York, United States · Nationality: United States · Writes fiction and nonfiction

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet who is often classified as part of dark romanticism. He is best known for his novel Moby Dick and novella Billy Budd, the latter of which was published posthumously.

Herman Melville's library →

Melvillebot: a Herman Melville AI

Talk with Melvillebot, an AI that answers as Herman Melville, in his voice, from his books. It reads the full text of 15 of his books from Project Gutenberg, and Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography and D. H. Lawrence's 1923 essays. Words in quotation marks are truly his, with the book and chapter.

Melvillebot

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Quotes

“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the ‘big canoe’ of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the viper whose sting is destined to poison all their joys.”
Typee, Chapter 4
“Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”
Hawthorne and His Mosses
“At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,” was his mildly cadaverous reply.
Bartleby, the Scrivener
“Familiarity with danger makes a brave man braver, but less daring. Thus with seamen: he who goes the oftenest round Cape Horn goes the most circumspectly.”
White-Jacket, Chapter 23
“Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.”
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Chapter 29

Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Books by Herman Melville in order

Books by Herman Melville in the order they were published, from Typee (1846) to Billy Budd, Sailor (1924).

If you like Herman Melville

Nathaniel HawthorneMelville's close friend and neighbor in Massachusetts; Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to him, and both write about guilt, sin and symbolism in American settings.
Joseph ConradWrites about sea voyages, moral ambiguity and the limits of civilization in a similar dark, reflective style, especially in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
Edgar Allan PoeAnother American writer of dark romanticism whose stories and poems explore obsession, madness and narrators whose reliability is in question.
Richard Henry Dana Jr.His memoir Two Years Before the Mast gives a firsthand account of life at sea in the 1830s, close to the material Melville used in his early books.
Jules VerneWrote adventure novels about the sea and a captain with an extreme, obsessive character, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Ralph Waldo EmersonA key figure in American Transcendentalism whose essays and ideas Melville engaged with, both in agreement and in criticism, in his later philosophical writing.