Answer the Questions

1.What works gained Рое reputation of America's greatest poet, short-story writer and literary critic?

2. Who raised Рое?

3. Why did Рое have to leave the university?

4. Why did Рое quarrel with his foster father?

5. What book did Poe's literary career begin with?

6. When did he move to New York City? What for?

7. When was Poe's most productive period?

8. What tragedy were the last years of Poe's life marked by?

9. What caused his drinking troubles?

10.Was he a habitual drunkard?

11.How did he die?

12.What are Poe's most popular tales filled with?

13.What are his most effective poems?

14.Was Рое a successful critic?

4.5. Herman Melville Herman Melville (1819—1891), ranks among America's ma­jor authors. He wrote «Moby-Dick», one of the great novels in lit­erature, and his reputation rests largely on this book. But many of his other works are literary creations of a high order — blending fact, fiction, adventure, and subtle symbolism. Melville's wealth of personal experience in faraway places was remarkable even in the footloose and exploring world of the 1800's. Melville brought to his extraordinary adventures a vivid imagination and a philo-

sophical skepticism, as well as a remarkable skill in handling the new American language.

His early life. Melville was born in New York City. The family name was Melvill, and lie added the «с» to the name. His father was a merchant from New England. His mother came from an old and socially prominent New York Dutch family. Melville lived his first 11 years in New York City. Following his father's death after suffering a financial and mental breakdown in 1831, the family moved to Albany, N.Y.

Young, inexperienced, and now poor, Melville tried a variety of jobs between 1832 and 1841. He was a clerk in his brother's hat store in Albany, worked in his uncle's bank, taught in a school near Pittsfield, Mass., and, in 1837, sailed to Liverpool, England, as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. He described this voyage in his novel «Redburn». Melville returned to America and signed on as a sea­man on the newly built whaling ship Acushnet for a trip in the Pa­cific Ocean. From this trip came the basic experiences recorded in several of his books, and above all, the whaling knowledge he later put into «Moby-Dick».

Melville sailed from New Bedford, Mass., on Jan. 3, 1841. He stayed on the Acushnet for 18 months. After the ship put in at Nuka Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, he and a shipmate deserted. The two men headed inland until they accidentally came to the lovely valley of the Typccs, a Polynesian tribe with a reputation as fierce canni­bals. However, the natives turned out to be gentle and charming hosts. Melville described his experiences with these people in «Турсс».

Melville lived in the valley for about a month. He then joined another whaling ship, but he soon deserted it with other sailors in a semimutiny at Tahiti. After a few days in a local jail, Melville and a new friend began roaming the beautiful and unspoiled islands of Tahiti and Moorea. Melville described his life during these wan­derings in the novel «Omoo».

After short service on a third whaling ship, Melville landed at the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), where he lived by doing odd jobs. On Aug. 17, 1843, he enlisted as a seaman on the frigate United. Slates, flagship of the Navy's Pacific Squadron. He re­counted his long voyage around Cape Horn to the United States in the novel «White-Jacket».

Melville arrived in Boston Harbor in Octobcr 1844. He was released from the Navy and headed home to Albany, his imagina­tion overflowing with his adventures.

His literary career. Melville wrote about his experiences so at­tractively that he soon became one of the most popular writers of his lime. The books that made his reputation were «Турее» (1846); «Отоо» (1847); «Mardi» (1849), a complex allegorical romance set in the South Seas; «Redburn» (1849); and «White-Jacket» (1850).

Melville then began «Moby-Dick», another «whaling voyage», as he called it, similar to his successful travel books. He had almost completed the book when he met Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne inspired him to radically revise the whaling documentary into a novel of both universal significance and literary complexity. «Moby- Dick, or The Whale» (1851), on one level, is the stoiy of the hunt for Moby Dick, a fierce white whale supposedly known to sailors of Melville's time. Captain Ahab is the captain of the whaling ship Pequod. He has lost a leg in an earlier battle with Moby Dick, and is determined to catch the whale. The novel brilliantly describes the dangerous and often violent life on a whaling ship, and con­tains information on the whaling industry and a discussion of the nature of whales. On another level «Moby-Dick» is a deeply sym­bolic story. The whale symbolizes the mysterious and complex force of the universe, and Captain Ahab represents the heroic struggle against the limiting and crippling constrictions that confront an in­telligent person.

Melville's popularity began to decline with the publication of his masterpiece. The novel, either ignored or misunderstood by crit­ics and readers, damaged Melville's reputation as a writer. When Melville followed «Moby-Dick» with the pessimistic and tragic novel «Pierre» (1853), his readers began to desert him, calling him either eccentric or mad. The public was ready to accept unusual and exciting adventures, but they did not want ironic, frightening exposures of the terrible double meanings in life.

Melville turned to writing short stories. Two of them, «Benito Cereno» and «Bartleby the Scrivener», rank as classics. Several of the stories were collected in «The Piazza Tales» (1856). But the haunting and disturbing question of the meaning of life that hov­ered over the stories also displeased the public. In 1855, Melville

published «Israel Potter», a novel set in the American Revolution. After «The Confidence-Man» (1856), a bitter satire on humanty, Melville gave up writing.

His later life. To make a living, Melville worked as deputy in­spector of customs in the Port of New York from 1866 to 1885. For private pleasure he wrote poetry, which he published at his own and his uncle's expense. He toured the Holy Land in 1856 and 1857. The trip resulted in a narrative poem, «Clarel» (1876). The poem presents a powerful picturc of a man's struggle to find his faith in a skeptical, materialistic world. Melville began writing prose again after his retirement. At his death, he left the manuscript of «Billy Budd, Sailor». This short novel, first published in 1924 and considered Melville's finest book after «Moby-Dick», is a sym­bolic story about the clash between innocence and evil, and be­tween social forms and individual liberty. The 1920's marked the start of a Melville revival among critics and readers. By the 1940's, Americans at last recognized his genius. His reputation has since spread throughout the world.