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Herman Melville
1 book in the library
Herman Melville (1819–1891) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet who went to sea at twenty and drew on it for the rest of his life. Moby-Dick, published in 1851, sold poorly and confused its reviewers; Melville spent his last decades working as a customs inspector in New York, his books out of print. The reappraisal came thirty years after his death, and the novel is now read as the central American epic. Billy Budd, found unfinished among his papers, was not published until 1924.