SHILOH
BY HERMAN MELVILLE
Herman Melville (1819-1891) will remain a permanent
fixture in World Literature for his masterpiece Moby
Dick, though he was almost entirely forgotten and out
of print in the last thirty years of his life. His family
went bankrupt shortly after his father’s death in 1832,
and the young Melville took a job aboard a ship after
leaving school. He stated, “A whale ship was my Yale
College and my Harvard.” Indeed, he put much of his
acquired knowledge of life at sea into his work. He
authored many short stories, novels, and poetry
during his lifetime, and his writing style reflects how
widely he read and how vast and diverse this
enigmatic author’s interests truly were.