American novelist and, in the end, poet — author of the strangest and most capacious book in the American canon. Melville went to sea in his twenties (whaler, merchantman, briefly a naval seaman), mined the experience for a series of increasingly ambitious novels (Typee, 1846; Omoo, 1847; Mardi, 1849; Redburn, 1849; White-Jacket, 1850), and in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) produced a work so large, so formally unruly, and so metaphysically insistent that his contemporaries did not know what to do with it.
Moby-Dick — the hunt of the monomaniac Captain Ahab for the white whale that took his leg — is at once a cetological encyclopedia, a revenge tragedy, a meditation on the blankness at the heart of nature, and a democratic epic of the Pequod's polyglot crew. Its failure in the market broke Melville's career. Pierre (1852) was worse received, and by The Confidence-Man (1857) he had essentially given up on fiction. He spent the last decades as a New York customs inspector, writing poetry (Battle-Pieces, 1866; Clarel, 1876) that has only recently been taken seriously.
Billy Budd, Sailor — the short novel of the innocent sailor hanged under martial law for striking a false accuser — was found in a drawer after his death and published in 1924. The "Melville Revival" of the 1920s made him a central figure of the American Renaissance, which is how we have read him since.