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Herman Melville (Volume 2, Episode 9, Part 1)

September 25, 2017 Phil Gibbons Leave a comment

Herman Melville: From obscurity to immortality

When he died at age 72, on September 28, 1891, Herman Melville was so obscure that those who even remembered his literary output presumed that he had passed away many decades earlier. Melville’s works were out of print, his last novel published more than thirty years before his death. The title of his epic work Moby Dick was misspelled in Melville’s New York Times obituary and one of his most respected efforts, “Billy Budd, Sailor,” had not even been published.

Elizabeth Shaw Melville, Melville’s Wife

Despite the initial Shaw family misgivings about how their future son-in-law would make a living as a writer, Herman Melville and Elizabeth Shaw were married in Boston, in August of 1847. They became permanent residents of New York City and the writer spent the next few years grinding out a succession of books.

Packing off his family to his in-laws in Boston, in October, 1856, Melville first set out for Glasgow and then Liverpool and a meeting with his friend, now diplomat, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Their reunion was friendly even warm but Hawthorne’s journal entries, while empathetic, depict Melville as a conflicted, lost soul.

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Herman Melville (Volume 2, Episode 9, Part 2)

September 25, 2017 Phil Gibbons Leave a comment

Herman Melville: From Obscurity to Immortality

Over forty, Melville need not be concerned with actually having to fight for the Union but in 1863, he and his wife decided to move back to New York City, exchanging Arrowhead, which he was unable to sell, for his brother Allan’s East 26^thStreet home.

Herman Melville, Last Photograph, Mid-1880’s

Throughout this time period, Melville continued to toil away at his custom’s officer’s job. When he began working at the Customs House in 1866 he took a horse drawn streetcar to work. By the 1880’s, so much time had passed that Melville took the Third Avenue El, an elevated railway, to his office on the Upper East Side.

Melville would remain in this position until his resignation on December 31, 1885. By that time, his wife had inherited a considerable amount of money from an aunt and other relatives, enough to allow Herman to retire.