As an ordinary seaman on the man-of-war United States, Melville returned to Boston in October 1844, where he resumed civilian life. Still, his imagination continued to seek refuge on the waves under a restless sky. In 1846, from his experience among the cannibals, he composed Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, the first of four semi-autobiographical novels. The book opened the world of the South Seas to readers and went into its fifth printing that same year, yet earned only $2,000. Although it had no erotic passages, his work met with negative criticism from religious reviewers who attacked another element—his description of the greed of missionaries to the South Pacific.
The favorable reaction of readers, on the other hand, encouraged Melville to produce more blends of personal experience and fiction: Omoo (1847), which is based on his adventures in Tahiti; Redburn (1848), which describes his first voyage to England; and White-Jacket (1850), which led to an act of Congress banning the practice of flogging in the U.S. Navy. One of his fans, Robert Louis Stevenson, was so intrigued by these and other seagoing romances that he followed Melville’s example and sailed to Samoa.
On August 4, 1847, Melville married Elizabeth “Lizzie” Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, to whom Typee is dedicated. The Melvilles honeymooned in Canada and settled in New York City on what is now Park Avenue South, where they spent the happiest years of their marriage and enjoyed intellectual company, including William Cullen Bryant, Richard Henry Dana, and Washington Irving. Their first child, Malcolm, was born in 1849. A second son, Stanwix, was born in 1851, followed by two daughters, Elizabeth in 1853 and Frances in 1855. In 1850, the Melville family moved to “Arrowhead,” a large, two-story frame house on a heavily wooded 160-acre farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Among his New England peers, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Maria Sedgwick, Melville established a reputation for honesty, courage, persistence, seriousness of expression and purpose and was, for a time, numbered among the Transcendentalists.
By the late 1840s, Melville, well established as a notable author of travel romances and a contributor of comic pieces to Yankee Doodle magazine, became known as “the man who had lived among the cannibals.” However, the public’s reaction to his experimentation with satire, symbol, and allegory in Mardi (1849) gave him a hint of the fickleness of literary fame. Victorian readers turned from his cynical philosophy and dark moods in favor of more uplifting authors. His own wife, who lacked her husband’s philosophical bent, confessed that the book was unclear to her. After the reading public’s rejection, he voiced his dilemma: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”
On an outing in the Berkshire Mountains, Melville made a major literary contact. He met and formed a close relationship with his neighbor and mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work he had reviewed in an essay for Literary World. Their friendship, as recorded in Melville’s letters, provided Melville with a sounding board and bulwark throughout his literary career. As a token of his warm feelings, he dedicated Moby-Dick (1851), his fourth and most challenging novel, to Hawthorne.
Melville attempted to support not only his own family but also his mother and sisters, who moved in with the Melvilles ostensibly to teach Lizzie how to keep house. In a letter to Hawthorne, Melville complains, “Dollars damn me.” He owed Harper’s for advances on his work. The financial strain, plus immobilizing attacks of rheumatism in his back, failing eyesight, sciatica, and the psychological stress of writing Moby-Dick, led to a nervous breakdown in 1856. The experience with Mardi had proved prophetic. Moby-Dick , now considered his major work and a milestone in American literature, suffered severe critical disfavor. He followed with Pierre (1852), Israel Potter (1855), The Piazza Tales (1856), and The Confidence Man (1857), but never regained the readership he had enjoyed with his first four novels.
Shunned by readers as uncouth, formless, irrelevant, verbose, and emotional, Moby-Dick was the nadir of his career. Alarmed by the author’s physical and emotional collapse, his family summoned Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to attend him. They borrowed money from Lizzie’s father to send Melville on a recuperative trek to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; however, his health remained tenuous.
