Author

Books by Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet, best known for Moby-Dick and the novella Billy Budd. He worked as a sailor and merchant seaman in his early twenties, experiences that shaped his major fiction. Moby-Dick was a commercial failure during his lifetime, and Melville largely abandoned novel-writing afterward, working for nineteen years as a customs inspector in New York. He was rediscovered in the 1920s and is now considered one of the foundational figures of American literature.