58 Fun Facts About Herman Melville

Where was Herman Melville born on August 1, 1819?

Manhattan was home, where his father imported French goods, until the business collapsed and the family moved upriver to Albany in 1830. He was born Herman Melvill: the final e was added after his father died.

Melville's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, joined which famous event of America's founding years?

The Boston Tea Party sent Major Thomas Melvill home with tea leaves caught in his shoes. The leaves were kept, and they are now on display at the Old State House in Boston.

Melville's mother, Maria Gansevoort, came from an old New York family of what descent?

Dutch settlers founded her line, and Herman was baptized by a Dutch Reformed minister. Her father, General Peter Gansevoort, had held Fort Stanwix through a British siege.

Melville's father died in debt in 1832, two years after his import business collapsed and he began trading in what?

Furs were his last gamble, made in Albany, and he died deep in debt. His eldest son, Gansevoort, took over the fur and cap business, and Herman left school at twelve.

After his father's death, young Melville worked as a clerk at what kind of institution?

A bank in Albany took him on as a clerk at twelve. He left to join his brother in the family business, and when that failed in 1837 the hunt for work sent him to sea.

In Moby-Dick, what does Ahab nail to the mast as a prize for the first man to sight the white whale?

A gold doubloon, a sixteen-dollar gold piece: Ahab hammers it to the mainmast himself, and from that moment the crew are hunting his whale instead of the oil they signed on for.

Melville's first voyage, as a cabin boy bound for Liverpool in 1839, became which novel?

Redburn took him under ten weeks to write; when reviewers praised it, Melville told his journal it was trash he had written 'to buy some tobacco with'.

Which whaler carried Melville from New Bedford to the Pacific in 1841?

The Acushnet was his first whaler: he lasted eighteen months aboard before deserting, and the hunt he learned on her decks became the working detail of Moby-Dick.

Melville said the Cape Horn chapters of which Richard Henry Dana Jr. memoir were 'written with an icicle'?

Two Years Before the Mast, a Harvard student's account of life as a common sailor, came out in 1840; within months Melville had signed on a whaler, and he later called its author 'my friend Dana'.

Mocha Dick, the real white whale behind Moby-Dick, was named for an island off which country?

Chile: whalers first fought him near Mocha Island before 1810, and by Jeremiah Reynolds's 1839 account the old bull, 'white as wool', had won about a hundred fights before he was killed.

At sea in 1841, Melville met the son of which Essex first mate, who handed him his father's account of the wreck?

Owen Chase had published his Narrative in 1821; Melville wrote that reading it on 'the landless sea', close to the latitude of the wreck, had a surprising effect on him.

What sank the Nantucket ship Essex in the Pacific in 1820?

A sperm whale rammed the Essex some 2,000 miles from South America; her twenty men took to three small whaleboats, and only eight lived to tell it.

Where did Melville and his shipmate Toby jump ship in the summer of 1842?

They deserted at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas; Typee claims a four-month stay among the islanders, but crew lists put Melville aboard an Australian whaler within about a month.

Melville was briefly jailed in Tahiti in 1842 for joining what aboard the whaler Lucy Ann?

A mutiny, though hardly a fierce one: the crew simply refused duty, the jail was so lax that he walked away from it, and he played the whole affair as farce in Omoo.

What does 'omoo', the title of Melville's second book, mean?

A beachcomber or island rover: Melville's preface says he borrowed the word from the Marquesan dialect for someone who wanders from one island to another, as he had just done around Tahiti.

Melville's 1850 novel about his year on a US Navy frigate attacked which punishment, banned by Congress that same year?

Flogging: he had watched shipmates lashed aboard the frigate United States. White-Jacket came out in March 1850 demanding an end to it, and that September Congress outlawed the lash on American ships.

Melville's first book Typee was first published in 1846 in which city?

London: his brother Gansevoort, newly posted to the American legation there, sold it to John Murray, who first wanted reassurance that the adventures had really happened; a New York edition followed weeks later.

Typee made Melville notorious as 'the man who lived among the' what?

Cannibals: Typee's tale of captivity among islanders made his name, and by 1851, deep in his whale book, he was groaning in a letter at the thought of going 'down to posterity' under that label.

In Moby-Dick's last pages, what keeps the lone survivor afloat until a passing ship picks him up?

A coffin: Queequeg ordered it when he thought he was dying, recovered, and let the carpenter seal it as the ship's life buoy; it shoots up from the vortex and carries the narrator for a day and a night.

What office did Lemuel Shaw, father of Melville's bride Elizabeth, hold when they married in 1847?

Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and an old friend of Melville's late father: Shaw lent the money for the Berkshire farm and kept the family afloat when the books stopped selling.

In Moby-Dick's Cetology chapter, the narrator weighs the science and then declares that a whale is what?

A fish: he grants that Linnaeus found lungs and warm blood, waves it all aside, and calls on 'holy Jonah' to back him, defining the whale as 'a spouting fish with a horizontal tail'.

Which 1849 novel was Melville's first not based on his own experiences, and was not well received?

Mardi starts as a third South Seas yarn and drifts into philosophical allegory; readers who wanted adventure were baffled, it sold poorly, and he dashed off two plain sea stories for the money.

What did Melville name the 160-acre Pittsfield farm he bought in 1850?

Arrowhead, for the native relics his plough turned up in the fields; he finished Moby-Dick in its upstairs study and stayed thirteen years, until debts sent the family back to New York.

On a Berkshire hike in 1850, what threw Melville and a fellow novelist together for the talk that began their friendship?

A thunderstorm: the party climbing Monument Mountain ran for shelter, the two novelists fell into talk, and two days later the older man wrote that he liked Melville so much he had asked him to come and stay.

To whom did Melville dedicate Moby-Dick 'in token of my admiration for his genius'?

Nathaniel Hawthorne, his Berkshire neighbour, wrote back that he understood the book, and Melville answered: 'I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.'

Under what title was Moby-Dick first published in Britain in October 1851?

The Whale: Melville's new title reached his British publisher too late, and that edition also lost its epilogue, so reviewers there complained that nobody is left alive to tell the tale.

Whose plays, which Melville devoured shortly before writing Moby-Dick, gave the novel its soliloquies, asides and stage directions?

William Shakespeare: Melville read him with eyes 'tender as young sparrows', marking the darkest passages of King Lear, and Ahab came out speaking in soliloquies like a doomed stage king.

The New York Day Book's venomous 1852 attack on Melville's novel Pierre ran under what headline?

HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY, and it ran as news, not as a review: the paper claimed his friends were arranging treatment and hoped they would keep him 'stringently secluded from pen and ink'.

In Moby-Dick, the ship's owners and first mate Starbuck all belong to which Nantucket faith?

Quakers: the sect came to dominate Nantucket, and the narrator relishes the contradiction of pacifists who shed more blood than any sailors afloat: 'fighting Quakers', he calls them, 'Quakers with a vengeance'.

What is the famous refrain of the clerk in 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'?

'I would prefer not to.' He says it first to proofreading, then to all copying, then to leaving the office, until his employer moves out instead; in the end he prefers not to eat.

What is the subtitle of 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'?

A Story of Wall Street, and walls are everywhere in it: the office windows face brick, the clerk stands for hours in what his employer calls 'dead-wall reveries', and he is last seen at the foot of a prison wall.

'Benito Cereno' fictionalizes a revolt aboard what kind of vessel?

A Spanish slave ship, and the captives already hold her: they stage a show of obedience so complete that a visiting American captain spends a whole day aboard misreading everything he sees.

Melville named his 1856 collection The Piazza Tales after what feature he had added to his Berkshire farmhouse?

A porch, or piazza in the usage of his day: he added it to the north side for the view and opened the collection with a story about it.

Melville dedicated his 1852 novel Pierre not to a person but to what?

Mount Greylock filled the view from his study window, and he addressed it as royalty: the dedication reads 'To Greylock's Most Excellent Majesty'.

Melville's last full-length novel, The Confidence-Man, is set aboard a steamboat on which river?

The Mississippi: the boat is bound for New Orleans, and a swindler who may be one man in a string of disguises works the decks, testing how far each passenger will trust a stranger.

Melville's novel of swindlers, The Confidence-Man, came out in 1857 on which fitting date?

April 1: the whole story unfolds on April Fools' Day, so the book appeared on the very day it describes. Reviewers were baffled, and he never published another novel.

In November 1856 Melville called on his old friend Hawthorne, who was then serving as what?

US Consul at Liverpool: the two walked the dunes at nearby Southport, where, his host's journal records, Melville said he had 'pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated'.

Home from a Mediterranean tour in 1857, Melville took to the lecture circuit with a talk on what?

Statues in Rome: he chose marble over the sailor's yarns that had made his name. He also spoke on 'The South Seas' and on 'Traveling', and after three tours he gave the platform up.

Melville's sketches 'The Encantadas', the Enchanted Isles, describe which islands he had seen from a whaler?

The Galápagos: his whaler cruised there in 1841, and he passes on a sailors' superstition that wicked sea captains are turned at death into the islands' tortoises.

Melville turned poet with Battle-Pieces, a collection about which conflict?

The Civil War: the 1866 book is dedicated to the Union dead, yet it ends with a prose supplement asking the victorious North to treat the beaten South with generosity.

What day job did Melville take in New York City in 1866 and keep for nearly two decades?

Customs inspector, at four dollars a day on the New York docks: the man once famous for Typee checked cargoes as his name faded from memory, and wrote poetry after hours.

Which future US president ran the New York Custom House from 1871 to 1878, while Melville was one of its inspectors?

Chester A. Arthur was collector of the port, boss of every customs man on the docks, until President Hayes removed him in a drive against the port's patronage machine; three years later he was president himself.

On an earlier voyage, what did the white whale take from Captain Ahab, setting off his hunt for revenge?

His leg; he walks on one carved from whale jawbone. Later he meets an English captain who lost an arm to the same whale and has cheerfully decided that Moby Dick is 'best let alone'.

Melville's 1876 epic poem Clarel follows a young American on a pilgrimage to which place?

The Holy Land, which he had toured himself two decades earlier: an uncle paid for the printing, and the poem found so few readers that the publisher destroyed the unsold copies.

In Moby-Dick, Ahab's ship the Pequod takes its name from what?

A Native American tribe, the Pequot, whom the narrator calls 'extinct as the ancient Medes'; that was Melville's slip, since Pequot nations still live in Connecticut today.

Melville's last two poetry collections, John Marr and Timoleon, were each privately printed in how many copies?

25 copies each, handed to family and friends: forty years earlier, as The New York Times recalled when he died, 'a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event'.

Where was Melville buried after his death in New York City in September 1891?

Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. That week The New York Times remarked that a man had 'died and been buried in this city' who was 'so little known, even by name' that one paper alone gave him an obituary, of three or four lines.

The New York Times's 1891 notice of Melville's death got what wrong?

His masterpiece's title: the notice credited him with 'Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales'. His two South Seas adventures still led the list, and his greatest book came third, misspelled.

When Melville died in 1891, what was the status of his final story, Billy Budd?

Still an unfinished manuscript: his widow put it in a tin box with his other papers, where it lay until his first biographer came across it, and it was finally printed in 1924.

In Billy Budd, the hero is pressed onto which Royal Navy warship?

HMS Bellipotent: Melville had first called her Indomitable and wrote the new name in only six times, so older editions and Britten's opera still sail under the old one.

Who is the master-at-arms whom Billy Budd strikes and kills?

John Claggart falsely accuses him, and Billy, whose stutter chokes him when he most needs words, answers with one blow. The captain believes him innocent, has him hanged anyway, and Billy dies crying 'God bless Captain Vere!'

Which English novelist hailed Moby-Dick in 1923 as 'the greatest book of the sea ever written'?

D. H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, just as the forgotten Melville was being rediscovered; one sentence earlier he had called the same book one 'of considerable tiresomeness'.

In which 1982 film does the dying villain spit Captain Ahab's curse, 'from hell's heart I stab at thee'?

The Wrath of Khan: Star Trek's Khan borrows Ahab's lines all through his pursuit of Kirk, and with his last breath delivers the speech Ahab makes as he hurls his final harpoon.

In 2010, scientists honored Melville by giving the name melvillei to which sea creature?

An extinct sperm whale, found in Peru: unlike its squid-sucking modern cousin it had teeth over a foot long in both jaws and probably hunted other whales.

Which songwriter retold Moby-Dick at length in a lecture, naming it among three books behind his songs?

Bob Dylan, in his 2017 Nobel lecture. Days later a writer in Slate pointed out that some of his lines about the novel, including a quotation that is nowhere in Melville, closely match the SparkNotes study guide.

Which sentence opens chapter one of Moby-Dick?

'Call me Ishmael.' Strictly it is not the first thing in the book: before chapter one come an etymology of the word whale and pages of whale quotations 'Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian'.

In Moby-Dick, the harpooneer Queequeg is a king's son from which invented island?

Rokovoko: 'It is not down in any map; true places never are.' Queequeg left it to learn from Christians, watched how sailors behaved ashore, and decided 'it's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan'.

Melville's 1855 novel Israel Potter follows a veteran of which war through decades of exile in England?

The Revolutionary War: wounded at Bunker Hill, captured at sea and carried to England, Potter gets home after fifty years to be refused a pension. Melville dedicated the book 'To His Highness the Bunker-Hill Monument'.