Birth of Herman Melville

Herman Melville was born on 1 August 1819 in Manhattan. An American novelist, short-story writer and poet, Melville is best known for Moby-Dick, the story of Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of a white whale, which draws on his own experience on whaling ships in the Pacific. His early adventure books, Typee and Omoo, made him popular, but his later work, including Moby-Dick and Pierre, sold poorly, and he was largely forgotten. He worked for many years as a customs inspector in New York. His short stories, such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno, and the novella Billy Budd, left unfinished at his death, were rediscovered in the twentieth century.

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