Herman Melville

Melville's father died bankrupt when he was twelve, and the family's fall put him to work early. He sailed as a cabin boy to Liverpool, then in 1841 shipped on the whaler Acushnet, deserted eighteen months later in the Marquesas, lived some weeks among the Typee, joined a mutiny in Tahiti and came home by way of the United States Navy.

Typee made him briefly famous as the man who had lived among cannibals. Readers wanted more of that. Instead he wrote Moby-Dick, dedicated it to Hawthorne, and produced a book that was reviewed with bafflement and sold barely three thousand copies in his lifetime. Pierre did worse. Within a few years he could not place a novel at all.

From 1866 he worked for nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, walking the waterfront at four hundred a year, writing poetry that nobody read. He died in 1891 obscure enough that an obituary misspelled his name. Billy Budd was found unpublished among his papers and printed in 1924, by which time the revival was under way and the book about the whale had begun its second life.