One of the half-dozen major American literary figures of 19th century, Herman Melville (1819-1891) is best-known as the author of his mighty book, Moby-Dick (1851), which is one of the world's greatest masterpieces.

Herman Melville was born in 1819 in Lansingburgh, New York. Though both his parents came from well-to-do families, a family business failure and, soon after, the death of his father made it necessary for him to leave school at the age of 15. He worked as a bank clerk, a salesman, a farmer and a school teacher, and when all these failed to offer him a decent livelihood, he went to sea at about 20. The early sailing experiences were rewarding, for they gave him a love of the sea, and aroused his desire for adventure. In 1841, Melville went to the South Seas on a whaling ship, where he gained the first-hand information about whaling that he used later in Moby-Dick. In the following three years, Melville served on three different whalers,

ed ship, took part in a mutiny, lived among the natives, worked as a store clerk in Honolulu, and finally served for a year in the regular navy. Working as a sailor, he had experienced the most brutalizing life in his time for a man, yet years of adventures also furnished him with abundant raw materials for most of his major fictions and his imaginative visions of life. Thus his career as a writer began.
In 1850, Melville moved to a farm in Massachusetts, where he had Nathaniel Hawthorne as his neighbor. They became very good friends, exchanging visits, writing to one another, and discussing each other's works. Apart from Hawthorne, whose black vision regarding the evil of human beings had in some way changed Melville's outlook on life and the world and whose allegorical way of exposition had affected his writing technique, Shakespearean tragic vision and Emersonian Transcendentalism also produced some positive effects on his writing. Moby-Dick was published in 1851. After Moby-Dick he continued writing fictions for a few years, but with less and less financial success. Gradually he turned to poetry writing, made some unsuccessful attempts at public lecturing, and in 1866 took a fulltime position as Inspector of Customs at the Port of New York, a position he held for the  nineteen years. In his final years he turned again to prose fiction and wrote what is probably his second famous work, Billy Budd, not published, however, until 1924.

Melville's writings can be well spanided into two groups, each with something in common in the light of the thematic concern and imaginative focus. His early works were written after he was back from the sea, chiefly between 1846 and 1852, when he was considered to be at his best. Books poured forth like a torrent. Among them are Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Mardi (1849), which drew from his adventures among the people of the ,South Pacific islands; Redburn (1849) is a semi-autobiographical novel, concerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors; in White Jacket (1850) Melville relates his life on a United States man-of-war. Of all these sea adventure stories, Moby-Dick proves to be the best. By writing such a book Melville reached the most flourishing stage of his literary creativity.

With the publication of Pierre (1852), a popular romance intended for the feminine market but provoking an outrageous repudiation, Melville's public fame was on the decline. He did not publish any more books until the late 1850s, when he wrote a series of short stories or novellas which attracted public attention again. Among them are "Bartleby, the Scrivener," a short story strikingly symbolizing the loneliness and anonymity and passivity of little men in big cities, "Benito Cereno," a novella about a ship whose black slave cargo mutiny holds their captain a terrorized hostage, The Confidence-Man (1857), in which the author uses the Confidence-man in successive guises to explore the paradoxes of belief and the optimisms and hypocrisies of American life, and Billy Budd (posthumously 1924), which again deals with the sea and sailors and the theme of a conflict between innocence and corruption. This group of works is a little different from the early ones. In the early ones, Melville is more enthusiastic about setting out on a quest for the meaning of the universe, hence they are more metaphysical and the main characters are ardent and self-dramatizing "I," defying God, as best reflected in Moby-Dick; while in the late works, Melville becomes more reconciled with the world of man, in which, he admits, one must live by the rules. However, the purpose of Melville's fictional tales, exotic or philosophical, is to penetrate as deeply as possible into the metaphysical, theological, moral, psychological, and social truths of human existence.

Moby-Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic. Although it is sented in the form of a novel, at times it seems like a prose poem. It is difficult to read because much of the talk in the novel is sailor's talk and much of the language is purposely old-fashioned and Elizabethan. However, if we can say that there is such a thing as the Great American Novel, Moby-Dick can well qualify for that distinction. The story is not complicated, dealing with Ahab, a man with an overwhelming obsession to kill the whale which has crippled him, on board his ship Pequod in the chase of the big whale. The dramatic description of the hazards of whaling makes the book a very exciting sea narrative and builds a literary monument to an era of whaling industry in the nineteenth century. But Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure, considering that Melville is a great symbolist. It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology.

Like Hawthorne, Melville is a master of allegory and symbolism. Instead of putting the battle between Ahab and the big whale into simple statements, be used symbols, that is, objects or persons who resent something else. Different people on board the ship are resentations of different ideas and different social and ethnic groups; facts become symbols and incidents acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truth. The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable, malignant, and beautiful as well. For the character Ahab, however, the whale resents only evil. Moby Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind. Ahab wills the whole crew on the Pequod to join him in the pursuit of the big whale so as to pierce  the wall, to root out the evil, but only to be destroyed by evil, in  this case, by his own consuming desire, his madness. For the author, as well as for the reader and Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable and ambivalent, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain a search, not a discovery, of the truth.

Symbolism is not the only way in which Melville has articulated; shaped, and sented the mighty theme of the book, Melville's great gifts of language, invention, psychological analysis, speculative agility, and narrative power are fused to make Moby-Dick a world classic. The skillful use of Ishmael both as a character and a narrator gives the novel a moral magnitude; the manipulation of the whaling chapters for some philosophical speculation makes the novel more than symbolic; different levels of language use and styles turn the whole book into a symphony with all the musical instruments going on to form a melody; and moreover, Melville's knowledge of epic and tragedy, the highest literary genres, helps him produce a great tragic epic, with Ahab at the center as a tragic hero, who burns with a baleful fire, becoming evil himself in his thirst to destroy evil.