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.
