If the acutest sage be often at his wits’ end to
understand living character, shall those who are not
sages expect to run and read character in those mere
phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a
wall?

—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man

How shall we read the character of Herman Melville (1819–1891)? For
many years the conventional view was that he rose to international
fame on the basis of Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), two tales of
idyllic life among the Polynesians of the South Seas; that he
attained his greatest literary achievement in a book that bombed
with most readers and critics of the day, the epic whaling adventure
Moby-Dick (1851); and then, after a series of nervous disorders
and experimental disasters highlighted by Pierre (1852) and The
Confidence-Man (1857), he all but disappeared from critical view.

There is a measure of truth in this poignant reading.
Melville stopped publishing novels in the late 1850s after it became
clear that he could not provide for his wife and family with his writing. Even writing short stories like
“Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby the Scrivener” failed to
support him. Consequently, he had to go to work as an
inspector in the customhouse in New York City, and,
when he died in 1891, most people who remembered his books
at all thought that “the man who had lived among the
cannibals” in the 1840s had died decades before.

Although Melville largely withdrew