Herman Melville Trivia
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58 free Herman Melville trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Herman Melville trivia quiz covers the whole life of the writer who died almost forgotten in 1891 and was rediscovered as the author of the Great American Novel. It begins with the New York boyhood cut short by his father's bankruptcy and death, the years as a bank clerk, teacher and 'green hand', the whaler Acushnet, jumping ship in the Marquesas, the Tahitian jail and the US Navy frigate that brought him home. It then follows his career: the overnight fame of Typee and Omoo, the marriage to Lemuel Shaw's daughter, the farm at Arrowhead and the friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, the magazine years that produced 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' and 'Benito Cereno', The Confidence-Man, the customs-house decades, the poetry (Battle-Pieces and the 18,000-line Clarel), the family tragedies, and the manuscript of Billy Budd found in a breadbox and published in 1924 during the Melville revival. There are a few Moby-Dick questions here, but for the whale itself, try our dedicated Moby-Dick quiz. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on Melville and his works, and each explanation adds one further detail. Play, see your score, and share it with the readers in your group chat.
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Q 01Where was Herman Melville born on August 1, 1819?
Manhattan
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.
Q 02Melville's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, joined which famous event of America's founding years?
The Boston Tea Party
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.
Q 03Melville's mother, Maria Gansevoort, came from an old New York family of what descent?
Dutch
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.
Q 04Melville's father died in debt in 1832, two years after his import business collapsed and he began trading in what?
Furs
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.
Q 05After his father's death, young Melville worked as a clerk at what kind of institution?
A bank
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.
Q 06In 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 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.
Q 07Melville's first voyage, as a cabin boy bound for Liverpool in 1839, became which novel?
Redburn
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'.
Q 08Which whaler carried Melville from New Bedford to the Pacific in 1841?
Acushnet
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.
Q 09Melville said the Cape Horn chapters of which Richard Henry Dana Jr. memoir were 'written with an icicle'?
Two Years Before the Mast
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'.
Q 10Mocha Dick, the real white whale behind Moby-Dick, was named for an island off which country?
Chile
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.
Q 11At sea in 1841, Melville met the son of which Essex first mate, who handed him his father's account of the wreck?
Owen Chase
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.
Q 12What sank the Nantucket ship Essex in the Pacific in 1820?
A sperm whale
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.
Q 13Where did Melville and his shipmate Toby jump ship in the summer of 1842?
Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas
Q 21In Moby-Dick's Cetology chapter, the narrator weighs the science and then declares that a whale is what?
A fish
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'.
Q 22Which 1849 novel was Melville's first not based on his own experiences, and was not well received?
Mardi
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.
Q 23What did Melville name the 160-acre Pittsfield farm he bought in 1850?
Arrowhead
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.
Q 14Melville was briefly jailed in Tahiti in 1842 for joining what aboard the whaler Lucy Ann?
A mutiny
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.
Q 15What does 'omoo', the title of Melville's second book, mean?
Beachcomber or island rover
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.
Q 16Melville's 1850 novel about his year on a US Navy frigate attacked which punishment, banned by Congress that same year?
Flogging
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.
Q 17Melville's first book Typee was first published in 1846 in which city?
London
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.
Q 18Typee made Melville notorious as 'the man who lived among the' what?
Cannibals
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.
Q 19In Moby-Dick's last pages, what keeps the lone survivor afloat until a passing ship picks him up?
A coffin
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.
Q 20What office did Lemuel Shaw, father of Melville's bride Elizabeth, hold when they married in 1847?
Chief Justice of Massachusetts
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.
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.
Q 24On a Berkshire hike in 1850, what threw Melville and a fellow novelist together for the talk that began their friendship?
A thunderstorm
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.
Q 25To whom did Melville dedicate Moby-Dick 'in token of my admiration for his genius'?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.'
Q 26Under what title was Moby-Dick first published in Britain in October 1851?
The Whale
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.
Q 27Whose plays, which Melville devoured shortly before writing Moby-Dick, gave the novel its soliloquies, asides and stage directions?
William Shakespeare
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.
Q 28The New York Day Book's venomous 1852 attack on Melville's novel Pierre ran under what headline?
HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY
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'.
Q 29In Moby-Dick, the ship's owners and first mate Starbuck all belong to which Nantucket faith?
Quakers
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'.
Q 30What is the famous refrain of the clerk in 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'?
'I would prefer not to.'
'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.