Omoo

by Herman Melville, Dons Ebooks (Created by)

Overview

He was quite a young man, pale and slender, more like a sicklycounting-house clerk than a bluff sea-captain. Bidding me be seated,he ordered the steward to hand me a glass of Pisco. In the state Iwas, this stimulus almost made me delirious; so that of all I thenwent on to relate concerning my residence on the island I canscarcely remember a word. After this I was asked whether I desired to"ship"; of course I said yes; that is, if he would allow me to enter for one cruise, engaging to discharge me, if I so desired, at thenext port. In this way men are frequently shipped on board whalemen in the South Seas. My stipulation was acceded to, and the ship'sarticles handed me to sign.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149777587
Publisher:	Dons Ebooks
Publication date:	06/17/2014
Series:	Everyman's Library , #297
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	308
File size:	261 KB

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15