Israel Potter: Works of Melville
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THE BIRTHPLACE OF ISRAEL.
The traveller who at the present day is content to travel in the good old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by a locomotive, nor dragged by a stage-coach; who is willing to enjoy hospitalities at far-scattered farmhouses, instead of paying his bill at an inn; who is not to be frightened by any amount of loneliness, or to be deterred by the roughest roads or the highest hills; such a traveller in the eastern part of Berkshire, Massachusetts, will find ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery of a country, which, owing to the ruggedness of the soil and its lying out of the track of all public conveyances, remains almost as unknown to the general tourist as the interior of Bohemia.
Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for twenty or thirty miles towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long broken spur of heights which the Green Mountains of Vermont send into Massachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you have the continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling of the plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of the earth. Unless by a sudden precipitation of the road you find yourself plunging into some gorge, you pass on, and on, and on, upon the crests or slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in its beauty, the valley of the Housatonie lies endlessly along at your feet. Often, as your horse gaining some lofty level tract, flat as a table, trots gayly over the almost deserted and sodded road, and your admiring eye sweeps the broad landscape beneath, you seem to be Bootes driving in heaven. Save a potato field here and there, at long intervals, the whole country is either in wood or pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep are the principal inhabitants of these mountains. But all through the year lazy columns of smoke, rising from the depths of the forest, proclaim the presence of that half-outlaw, the charcoal-burner; while in early spring added curls of vapor show that the maple sugar-boiler is also at work. But as for farming as a regular vocation, there is not much of it here. At any rate, no man by that means accumulates a fortune from this thin and rocky soil, all whose arable parts have long since been nearly exhausted.
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Works of Melville
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet from the American Renaissance period. Most of his writings were published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his sea adventure Typee (1846) and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he was almost forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. Melville's writing draws on his experience at sea as a common sailor, exploration of literature and philosophy, and engagement in the contradictions of American society in a period of rapid change. The main characteristic of his style is probably pervasive allusion, reflecting his written sources. Melville's way of adapting what he read for his own new purposes, scholar Stanley T. Williams wrote, "was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's".
Born in New York City as the third child of a merchant in French dry-goods, Melville ended his formal education abruptly after his father died in 1832, shortly after bankruptcy left the family in financial straits. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839. This voyage to Liverpool as a common sailor on a merchant ship became the basis for his fourth book, Redburn (1849). In late December 1840 he signed up aboard the Acushnet for his first whaling voyage, but jumped ship eighteen months later in the Marquesas Islands. His first book, Typee (1846), a fictionalized account of his life among the natives there, became such a success that he worked up a sequel, Omoo (1847). The same year Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw; their four children were born between 1849 and 1855.
In August 1850, Melville moved his family to a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he established a profound but short-lived friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Moby-Dick was published in 1851 to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial failure. Less than a year later, Melville's career as a popular author effectively ended with the cool reception of Pierre. The next years he turned to writing short fiction for magazines, such as "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno." After the serialized novel Israel Potter was published as a book in 1855, the short stories were collected in 1856 as The Piazza Tales. In 1857, Melville voyaged to England and the Near East; twenty years later, he worked his experience in Egypt and Palestine into an epic poem, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876). In 1857 he published The Confidence-Man, his last prose work during his lifetime. Having secured a position as Customs Inspector, he moved to New York. He turned to poetry, the first example of which is his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the Civil War, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866).
In 1867 his oldest child, Malcolm, died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. In 1886 Melville retired as Customs Inspector and privately published two volumes of poetry. During the last years of his life, he returned to prose again and worked on Billy Budd, Sailor. Left unfinished at his death, it was eventually published in 1924; it was adapted as a Broadway stage play and as an English opera in 1951, and a decade later as a film. Melville's death in 1891 from cardiovascular disease subdued the reviving interest in him. The centennial in 1919 of his birth was near the starting point of the "Melville Revival," as scholars returned to his work and life, and Melville's writings have been appreciated as world classics.
