Herman Melville's Accomplishments

Herman Melville was a man who struggled with finances as well as supporting his family throughout his short but great writing career. Because of this struggle to both find and keep a paying job, Melville discovered the not-so-popular whaling business through which he found his life-long passion for writing. While intrigued by the idea of writing for financial security, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote with a shade of darkness in his writings, which excited and greatly influenced Melville in his later works, for, in the beginning, Melville simply wrote purely about his various life adventures traveling the world (Brooks 167, 148). Owing to the great writers of the nineteenth century, Melville slowly became one of the most popular authors of his time

While there, Melville’s family also told him stories of his two cousins Thomas Melville and Guert Gansevoort pertaining to their lives at sea, as well as from his own father’s life on ships, perhaps sparking his own desire to travel. Melville’s early 20s consisted of both worry for not being able to increase his family’s income and guilt for not being able to plant himself in a career or job. Melville eventually fabricated the idea that he would try life at sea, perhaps influenced by both the pressure of society and the stories that his family told him pertaining to seamen. After these stimuli, Melville boarded his first ship, the St. Lawrence, which left him with a longing feeling for the rigging life to which he occupied by signing on as a common seaman aboard the Acushnet in 1843. The Acushnet’s first harbor was at Nuku Hiva, located in the South Seas (Steffof 7, 13-14, 29). Because of his interest in the Marquesas Islands from his family’s stories, Melville deserted with a friend, Tobias Greene, in order to absorb some Marquesan

in Chase 5). Also, Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the most famous writers of the time period, was perhaps Melville’s only true friend who sustained him, and once Hawthorne left Melville’s side, Melville felt deprived in a sense. Hawthorne went on to applaud Melville’s various works to the extent that Melville dedicated one of his best-selling novels, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne later, and in this particular case, solving Melville’s particular case of writers’ block (Brooks 168, 166). By the time Melville published his third and fourth novels Mardi and Redburn, respectively, Melville had reached a brand new level of maturity. For instance, in Redburn, he exhibited a tolerant humanitarian attitude to which he believed that all people make up one universal family, writing, “For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world; there is no telling who does not own a stone in the Great Wall of China.” (qtd. in Steffof 74-75). This statement of Melville’s shows how mature he has grown in formulating the themes for his novels, and Rebecca Steffof even went as far as to say that, “If Melville had overestimated the value of his Mardi, in Redburn he had written a better book