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Herman Melville - College Essay

Herman Melville

In 1850 while writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's
publisher introduced him to another writer who was in the midst of a novel. This
was , the book Moby Dick. Hawthorne and Melville became good
friends at once, for despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they had a great deal
in common. Melville was a New Yorker, born in 1819, one of eight children of a
merchant of distinguished lineage. His father, however, lost all his money and
died when the boy was 12. Herman left school at 15, worked briefly as a bank
clerk, and in 1837 went to sea. For 18 months, in 1841 and 1842, he was crewman
on the whaler Acushnet. Then he jumped ship in the South Seas. For a time he
lived among a ...

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Melville became conscious of deeper powers. In 1849 he began
a systematic study of Shakespeare, pondering the bard's intuitive grasp of human
nature. Like Hawthorne, Melville could not accept the prevailing optimism of
his generation. Unlike his friend, he admired Emerson, seconding the Emersonian
demand that Americans reject European ties and develop their own literature.
"Believe me," he wrote, "men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day
being born on the banks of the Ohio." Yet he considered Emerson's vague talk
about striving and the inherent goodness of mankind complacent nonsense.

Experience made Melville too aware of the evil in the world to be a
transcendentalist. His novel Redburn based on his adventures on a Liverpool
packet, was, as the critic F. O. Matthiessen put it, "a study in disillusion, of
innocence confronted with the world, of ideals shattered by facts." Yet
Melville was no cynic; he expressed deep sympathy for the Indians and for
immigrants, ...

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Herman Melville. (2007, August 24). Retrieved January 18, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Herman-Melville/70116

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 8/24/2007 11:14:59 PM
Category: Biographies
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 611
Pages: 3

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