Herman Melville

American · b. 1819

Herman Melville jumped ship in the Marquesas, lived among the Typee, and turned Pacific whaling into Moby-Dick — which baffled critics, sold about 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and ended his career. He spent his last nineteen years as a New York customs inspector; his obituaries misspelled the title of the book now at the center of the American canon.