Now recognized as one of the greatest American writers ever, Melville struggled in his own lifetime. He had early commercial success with the adventure novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847)—both were in part based on his own time at sea, but he himself considered them minor works.

Melville then began work on Moby Dick, which would be his masterpiece. In 1850, he moved his family to Pittsfield, Massachusetts and became close with fellow American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Even before Moby Dick was released in 1851, Melville sensed that his ambitious book may have a hard time with the public. He wrote in a June 1851 letter to Hawthorne:

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, – I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.

Moby Dick was largely a commercial failure, but Melville’s next novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities did even worse. After that failure, Melville turned to short story writing. He still could not support his family from his earnings as a writer, and so he also went to work in the Customs office (a job his father-in-law, the Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Lemuel Shaw helped arrange for him). He released Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and Israel Potter in magazines—they would eventually become The Piazza Tales collection. Readers can trace an ambivalence about work, money, identity and systems throughout Melville’s work, but it’s especially pronounced in those short stories.

By 1867, when his eldest son Malcolm died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Melville had largely turned to poetry. However, after retiring from the Customs office, Melville turned to prose once more. The novella Billy Budd, Sailor was still unpublished when Melville died in 1891, but was finally released in 1924. The “Melville Revival” that restored Melville’s reputation began in the 1910s and continued through the 1920s with the publishing of Billy Budd.