States Navy, serving on the frigate United States, which brought
him back to Boston in October, 1844.
Melville was now twenty-five and seemed no closer to finding
a career than four years before. Except for letters published
in a local newspaper, he had shown few signs of a gift for
writing. As he recounted his adventures for his family,
however, they urged him to write the tales down. In this way,
it is said, he discovered his calling. Later he told his friend
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "From my twenty-fifth year I date my
life."
Melville's account of his time in the Marquesas, the novel
Typee, was published in the spring of 1846. Advertisements
promised readers "personal adventure, cannibal banquets...
carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters, savage
woodlands guarded by horrible idols, heathenish rites and human
sacrifices." And the book was a great popular success. Today,
Melville probably would have won a place on best-seller lists
and an article in People magazine as "the man who lived with the
cannibals." Melville continued to draw on his sea adventures in
the novels Omoo (1847), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850).
Another novel, Mardi, published in 1849, was an unsuccessful
attempt to add fantasy and philosophy to sea stories.
Melville had become a popular writer, but he wasn't fully
satisfied with his popularity. On the one hand, with a wife and
children to support, he needed the money that success brought
him. But on the other, writing simple adventure stories was, he
said, no more creative than sawing wood. He had greater
ambitions. At the same time, while most popular writers of the
day tended to be optimistic about America and about mankind,
Melville was--perhaps because of his riches-to-rags
childhood--in many ways a deeply pessimistic and insecure
figure, doubtful about his nation, doubtful about man, doubtful
about the universe.
Moby-Dick is the result of both Melville's ambitions and his
doubts. When he began the book, he intended to call it The
Whale and promised his publishers that it would be another
popular sea adventure. But midway through his writing something
changed. Melville had moved to the Berkshire Mountains of
western Massachusetts and met Nathaniel Hawthorne, already
famous as the author of The Scarlet Letter. In Hawthorne,
Melville seemed to find a kindred spirit, a man who had
fulfilled himself writing the kind of dark, complex books that
Melville wanted to write. Perhaps the older author's example
gave Melville the courage to achieve his ambitions. Whatever
the reason, soon after he met Hawthorne, Melville began
furiously to rewrite The Whale. The finished product reached
