In the prologue to his biography of Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford states that Melville shares with Walt Whitman the distinction of being the greatest imaginative writer America has produced. He says that in depth of religious insight there is no one in the nineteenth century to compare with him except Dostoyevsky.

Herman was born in New York City of Scottish-Dutch ancestors. One of his grandfathers joined the Boston Tea Party of 1773. A series of misfortunes, beginning with his father’s early death, preceded his shipping out on the whaler “Acushnet.” He jumped ship in Polynesia, whose island story Typee he wrote in 1848. This early work remained in print throughout his lifetime and was distributed worldwide thanks partly to its erotic symbolism.

Despite financial difficulties, he continued to write—with high encouragement by his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick, a tale of his whaling expedition, initially received small praise and small sales. Years of rheumatic pain during his writing short stories for magazines were relieved by his appointment as an inspector of customs in New York City, where he joined the All Souls Unitarian Church.

When he died, there was only one obituary notice which contained only four lines. Not until the 1950s did Herman Melville find recognition for what the Encyclopaedia Britannica names a novel not equaled in scope by any previous piece of American literature and never matched in its portentous portrayal of human struggle with the forces of the universe.