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Herman Melville Defined - College Essay

Herman Melville Defined

Herman Melville was born August 1, 1819 in New York. He was the third of eight children who lived in poverty throughout their late childhood. Melville grew up hearing tales of adventure, as his father was a world traveler and both his grandfathers’ Revolutionary War heroes. This prompted him to seek a brave, courageous life, and then put his experiences on paper.
Allan Melville died when his son was only twelve. This forced Herman to quit school and find work to help support the family. This cut his education short, and he never actually returned to organized schooling. He found jobs teaching writing at various schools but found it “unrewarding, boring, and poorly paid” (14). ...

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The result was his first two well-known novels: Typee and Omoo. Shortly after this Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, and together they had four children.
During his career, Melville was known as a great writer only for his early adventure novels. He was more interested in writing about “passion, innocence, religion, philosophy, and political subjects,” and refused to write, as he put it, “the other way” (13). The public disliked these subjects and his new style, compared to previous works. Due to the lack of money for his family, Melville was forced to return to his adventurous style of writing. He wrote Redburn, a tale about his experiences aboard the ship United States during his service with the U.S. Navy. Although the public was grateful Melville returned to a more realistic style, he was very unhappy. He wrote to his father-in-law, “no reputation that is gratifying to me, can possibly be achieved by this book. This is a job, which I have done for money-being forced to ...

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Herman Melville Defined. (2007, March 29). Retrieved January 11, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Herman-Melville-Defined/62553

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 3/29/2007 04:46:37 PM
Category: Biographies
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 779
Pages: 3

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