Happy Birthday, Herman Melville!

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Garrison Keillor):
August 1 is the birthday of the man who said, "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." That's the novelist and poet Herman Melville, born in New York City (1819). His father died when Melville was 12, leaving the family almost penniless. As a young man, he tried working first as a banker, then a teacher. When he was 26, he went to sea and ended up deserting his post on a ship in the South Pacific, living for several months with the Typee natives. He wrote a popular account of this experience called Typees: A Peep Into Polynesian Life (1846).
After his years at sea, Melville married and settled down in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, where he befriended his neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and began to experiment writing allegorical novels that were not well received. Moby-Dick came out in 1851, and was soon followed by Pierre and The Confidence Man. None were critical successes. He eventually accepted a job as a customs inspector in New York, where he quietly worked for the next 20 years, gaining a reputation for his honesty amid the expected bribery.
When he died of a heart attack at the age of 72, his obituary in the local New York Times was just four lines. It wasn't until the 1920s, when British university students became interested in his nautical tales, that Melville was rediscovered and his works were put back into print.