Melville, Herman

Herman Melville (1819 to 1891) was an American author whose own whaling voyage on the Acushnet from New Bedford in 1841, and desertion in the Marquesas, fed his early books Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). His masterwork Moby-Dick (1851) drew on the whale fishery and the 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex by a sperm whale. The posthumous Billy Budd, Sailor (written 1888 to 1891, published 1924) returned to shipboard law and conscience. Largely neglected in his lifetime, he is now central to American sea literature.