“Moby Dick” author, Herman Melville, was born in New York on August 1st, 1819. Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period.
Born in New York City as the third child of a merchant in French dry goods, Melville’s formal education ended abruptly after his father died in 1832, leaving the family in financial straits. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship.
In August 1850, Melville moved his growing family to Arrowhead, a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he established a profound but short-lived friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick was another commercial failure, published to mixed reviews.
Melville’s death from cardiovascular disease in 1891 subdued a reviving interest in his work. The centennial of his birth in 1919 became the starting point of the “Melville Revival”. Critics discovered his work, scholars explored his life, his major novels and stories have become world classics, and his poetry has gradually attracted respect.