Call Me Ishmael.
Nobody Did.

Your father is dead. He died bankrupt and possibly insane, his merchant business destroyed by speculation and the economic collapse of 1837. You are the third of eight children, and the family has no money. You have tried schoolteaching. You have tried working at your uncle's farm. You are twenty years old, uneducated beyond the rudiments, and your options in New York City in 1839 are limited.

A merchant ship, the St. Lawrence, is taking on hands for a voyage to Liverpool. The work is brutal — hauling lines, climbing rigging, cleaning decks. The pay is almost nothing. You will be the lowest-ranked person on the ship. But the sea is there, gray and enormous at the end of Manhattan's streets, and something in you responds to its complete indifference to your family's fallen fortunes.

You sign the papers as an ordinary seaman. The ship sails on June 5th. What you experience will become the material for your entire literary career.

The whaling ship Acushnet has been at sea for eighteen months. The conditions are wretched: the captain is brutal, the food is rotten, and the whale oil you came to harvest has proved elusive. The ship puts in at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, for fresh water and provisions. Around you, the island rises in volcanic green above the black beach. Flowers you have no names for. People who have never heard of New York.

You and a shipmate named Richard Tobias Greene have a decision to make. Deserting a whaling ship is a serious offense — you can be imprisoned or forcibly returned. But the alternative is another two or three years at sea under a captain whose cruelty is documented. You have heard that the valley of Typee, just over the ridgeline, is inhabited by a tribe variously described as dangerous and welcoming. You have heard, too, that a tribe in the next valley — the Happars — are friendly and safe.

You have written an account of your time with the Typee — a warm, sensuous, sometimes dangerous month among people whose relationship to work, pleasure, and nature is utterly unlike anything New England has to offer. Your publisher John Murray wants it for his "Home and Colonial Library" series. The problem is that Murray's readers expect factual travel writing, and your account is substantially embellished. The Typee were probably not going to eat you. The violence you describe is exaggerated. The erotic content is real.

Murray wants you to cut the political commentary — your criticisms of Christian missionaries and French colonialism in the Pacific — and certify the book as strictly factual autobiography. American publishers are more relaxed about the fiction question but want the missionary criticism toned down to avoid offending the church-going public. You are a twenty-six-year-old failed sailor from a bankrupt family. This is your shot.

You have moved your family to a farmhouse in the Berkshires called Arrowhead, and you are writing a book about whaling. It started as a fairly conventional adventure — the chase, the hunt, the life of the whaleman at sea — the kind of book that had worked for you with Typee. Then you met Nathaniel Hawthorne. He lives six miles away. You have been reading Mosses from an Old Manse with the scalp-lifting sensation of encountering a mind that is actually seeing something.

You begin writing him letters of a philosophical intensity that surprise you both. He encourages you to go deeper — to stop writing adventure and write something that uses the whale as the occasion for something larger. You are burning through the farm's firewood. You are writing by candlelight. Your wife Elizabeth carries your meals upstairs to the desk. The whale is becoming something else: obsession, fate, God, the indifferent universe. You are thirty years old and you are writing the most ambitious book in American literature.

The reviews of Moby-Dick were mixed and the sales were poor. Your publisher lost money. Your readers — the ones who made Typee a modest hit — are baffled by a 600-page meditation on obsession and cosmology disguised as a whaling adventure. You need money desperately: the farm has debts, Elizabeth is pregnant with your second child, and your father-in-law Lemuel Shaw — the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, a man of impeccable Boston rectitude — is watching your career with increasing alarm.

You have started writing Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. It is the darkest, strangest, most psychologically disturbing thing you have ever attempted — a gothic novel about incest, artistic failure, and the impossibility of moral purity. It is also, transparently, about a writer whose great book has been ignored. You know it will not sell. You write it anyway.

Your father-in-law has funded a trip to Europe and the Middle East, partly as a rest cure and partly — everyone understands but nobody says — to get you away from the desk and the debts and the whiskey for a while. You stop in Liverpool to see Hawthorne, who is serving as American consul there. The two of you walk on the sand dunes at Southport for an afternoon, and Hawthorne writes something about the conversation in his journals that has been quoted ever since.

He writes that Melville "can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief, and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other." The whale, the cosmos, God's presence or absence in the world — you have been circling the same question for twenty years of writing without resolving it. Hawthorne thinks this unresolved circling is your defining characteristic. He doesn't say whether it's a weakness or a strength.

You take the job. Inspector Number 75 at the New York Custom House, Gansevoort Street, a four-dollar-a-day salary. You will inspect cargo ships coming into the harbor for smuggled goods. You will do this job for nineteen years. Your writing career, as a public thing, is essentially over. The last novel you published — The Confidence-Man in 1857 — sold almost nothing. A lecture tour failed. A book of Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces (1866), was ignored. The market for Herman Melville has closed.

What very few people know — what almost no one will know until scholars examine your papers after your death — is that you continue writing. The desk at home. The evenings after Elizabeth and the children are asleep. Long poems. Eventually, a novella about a young sailor named Billy Budd, who is hanged for a crime that was also an act of grace. You will not finish it. It will be found in a bread box after you die.

You die on September 28th, 1891, at home on East 26th Street, of cardiovascular disease. The New York Times runs a brief obituary that calls you "Henry Melville." The obituary notes that you were "once" known as the author of Typee and Omoo, and that in later years you had "fallen into a literary decline." Your family keeps Billy Budd's unfinished manuscript in a bread box. The manuscript will stay there for thirty-three years.

In 1919 — twenty-eight years after your death — a British scholar named Raymond Weaver begins researching a biography. He reads Moby-Dick. Then he reads it again. Something happens in literary history: the book that your own century ignored begins to be read by the next one. By 1921, the centenary of your birth, there is a "Melville Revival." By 1926, Moby-Dick is a canonical text. By 1956, it is on every American high school curriculum. The obituary that misspelled your name has become the most ironic document in the history of American letters.