Family and early life
Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan Melvill (1782–1832) and Maria (Gansevoort) Melvill (1791–1872). Herman was the third of eight children in a

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General narrative style
Melville's writing style shows both consistencies and enormous changes throughout the years. His development "had been abnormally

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Melville's financial success as a writer during his lifetime was not great, relative to his posthumous success; over his entire lifetime Melville's writings earned him just over $10,000 (equivalent to $243,031 in 2020). Melville's travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas

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Melville's work often touched on themes of communicative expression and the pursuit of the absolute among illusions. As early as 1839, in the juvenile sketch "Fragments from a Writing Desk", Melville explores a problem which would reappear in the short stories "Bartleby" (1853)

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• Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846)
• Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847)
• Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849)
• Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)

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• Arvin, Newton (1950). Herman Melville. New York: William Sloane Associates. LCCN 50-7584. May be borrowed at Internet Archive here
• Bercaw, Mary (1987). Melville's Sources. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-0734-1

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In 1982, the Library of America (LOA) began publication. In honor of Melville's central place in American culture, the very first volume contained

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