Herman Melville Sails from New Bedford
On this day in 1841, Herman Melville boarded the whaleship Acushnet and sailed out of New Bedford, the whaling capital of the world. As he later wrote about his character Ishmael, that ship would be "my Yale College and my Harvard." After five years at sea, Melville returned to Boston and began writing novels about his adventures. He published five books in five years—all of them commercially successful sea tales. In 1850, he moved to a farm in the Berkshires. There he wrote Moby-Dick. A critical and commercial failure, the book marked the end of Melville's career as a successful novelist. Moby-Dick was not rediscovered until the 1920s. It has been considered one of the single greatest American novels ever since.
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