Herman Melville (1819–1891) left school as a teenager when his family declared bankruptcy, and he worked at several jobs, including crewing on whaling ships. He enjoyed initial literary success with his first two novels, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, but ironically, Moby-Dick, for which he had high hopes, was poorly received, setting off a decline in his popularity until the rediscovery of his writing in the early twentieth century. Melville’s body of work includes ten novels; dozens of short stories, most notably “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”; and several books of poetry and journals.
WORKS THAT HAVE APPEARED IN NARRATIVE:
- Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street, a short story, in Stories of the Week: 2013–2014