Herman Melville
1819 CE–1891 CE · Novelist · New York City
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, born in New York City in 1819. After his family's finances collapsed, he worked as a clerk, teacher, and sailor, shipping out in 1841 aboard the whaler Acushnet. His experiences in the Pacific, including time among the Marquesas Islanders after he deserted ship, shaped early narratives such as Typee and Omoo. Settling at Arrowhead farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he wrote Moby-Dick (1851). Later works, including the tale published posthumously as Billy Budd, received little attention in his lifetime. He spent his final decades as a New York customs inspector, dying in 1891.
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New York City
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In New York City at the same time
Alexis de Tocqueville, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Antonín Dvořák, Henry James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sergei Rachmaninoff
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Herman Melville’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Luminaries & Explorers world
- Victor Hugo· 1802 CE–1885 CE
- Franz Liszt· 1811 CE–1886 CE
- Giuseppe Verdi· 1813 CE–1901 CE
- Richard Wagner· 1813 CE–1883 CE
- Mikhail Bakunin· 1814 CE–1876 CE
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton· 1815 CE–1902 CE
- Frederick Douglass· 1818 CE–1895 CE
- Karl Marx· 1818 CE–1883 CE
- Ivan Turgenev· 1818 CE–1883 CE
- Walt Whitman· 1819 CE–1892 CE
- George Eliot· 1819 CE–1880 CE
- Gustave Courbet· 1819 CE–1877 CE
- Friedrich Engels· 1820 CE–1895 CE
- Susan B. Anthony· 1820 CE–1906 CE
- Richard Francis Burton· 1821 CE–1890 CE
- Fyodor Dostoevsky· 1821 CE–1881 CE
- Gustave Flaubert· 1821 CE–1880 CE
- Jules Verne· 1828 CE–1905 CE
- Emily Dickinson· 1830 CE–1886 CE
- Camille Pissarro· 1830 CE–1903 CE
- Édouard Manet· 1832 CE–1883 CE
- Lewis Carroll· 1832 CE–1898 CE
- Johannes Brahms· 1833 CE–1897 CE
- Georges Bizet· 1838 CE–1875 CE
Scientists
Jewish world
Buddhist world
Islamic world
Rulers world
- Cetshwayo· 1826 CE–1884 CE
- Manuelito (Hastiin Ch'il Haajiní)· 1818 CE–1893 CE
- James A. Garfield· 1831 CE–1881 CE
- William Gladstone· 1809 CE–1898 CE
- Otto von Bismarck· 1815 CE–1898 CE
- Ulysses S. Grant· 1822 CE–1885 CE
- Ouray· 1833 CE–1880 CE
- Abdulaziz· 1830 CE–1876 CE
- Rutherford B. Hayes· 1822 CE–1893 CE
- Chester A. Arthur· 1829 CE–1886 CE
- Washakie· 1804 CE–1900 CE
- Pedro II of Brazil· 1825 CE–1891 CE
- Crazy Horse (Tȟašúŋke Witkó)· 1840 CE–1877 CE
- Lobengula· –1894 CE
Works
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