title: British Isles

text: Viking invasions began in the 9th century, followed by more permanent settlements, particularly along the east coast of Ireland, the west coast of modern-day Scotland and the Isle of Man. Though the Vikings were eventually neutralised in Ireland, their influence remained in the cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Wexford. England, however, was slowly conquered around the turn of the first millennium AD, and eventually became a feudal possession of Denmark. The relations between the descendants of Vikings in England and counterparts in Normandy, in northern France, lay at the heart of a series of events that led to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The remnants of the Duchy of Normandy, which conquered England, remain associated to the English Crown as the Channel Islands to this day. A century later, the marriage of the future Henry II of England to Eleanor of Aquitaine created the Angevin Empire, partially under the French Crown. At the invitation of Diarmait Mac Murchada, a provincial king, and under the authority of Pope Adrian IV (the only Englishman to be elected pope), the Angevins invaded Ireland in 1169. Though initially intended to be kept as an independent kingdom, the failure of the Irish High King to ensure the terms of the Treaty of Windsor led Henry II, as King of England, to rule as effective monarch under the title of Lord of Ireland. This title was granted to his younger son, but when Henry's heir unexpectedly died, the title of King of England and Lord of Ireland became entwined in one person.


title: British Isles

text: By the Late Middle Ages, Great Britain was separated into the Kingdoms of England and Scotland. Power in Ireland fluxed between Gaelic kingdoms, Hiberno-Norman lords and the English-dominated Lordship of Ireland. A similar situation existed in the Principality of Wales, which was slowly being annexed into the Kingdom of England by a series of laws. During the course of the 15th century, the Crown of England would assert a claim to the Crown of France, thereby also releasing the King of England from being vassal of the King of France. In 1534, King Henry VIII, at first having been a strong defender of Roman Catholicism in the face of the Reformation, separated from the Roman Church after failing to secure a divorce from the Pope. His response was to place the King of England as "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England", thereby removing the authority of the Pope from the affairs of the English Church. Ireland, which had been held by the King of England as Lord of Ireland, but which strictly speaking had been a feudal possession of the Pope since the Norman invasion was declared a separate kingdom in personal union with England.


title: British Isles

text: Scotland meanwhile had remained an independent Kingdom. In 1603, that changed when the King of Scotland inherited the Crown of England, and consequently the Crown of Ireland also. The subsequent 17th century was one of political upheaval, religious division and war. English colonialism in Ireland of the 16th century was extended by large-scale Scottish and English colonies in Ulster. Religious division heightened and the king in England came into conflict with parliament over his tolerance towards Catholicism. The resulting English Civil War or War of the Three Kingdoms led to a revolutionary republic in England. Ireland, largely Catholic was mainly loyal to the king, but by military conquest was subsumed into the new republic. Following defeat to the parliament's army, large scale land distributions from loyalist Irish nobility to English commoners in the service of the parliamentary army created a new Ascendancy class which obliterated the remnants of Old English (Hiberno-Norman) and Gaelic Irish nobility in Ireland. The new ruling class was Protestant and English, whilst the populace was largely Catholic and Irish. This theme would influence Irish politics for centuries to come. When the monarchy was restored in England, the king found it politically impossible to restore the lands of former landowners in Ireland. The "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 repeated similar themes: a Catholic king pushing for religious tolerance in opposition to a Protestant parliament in England. The king's army was defeated at the Battle of the Boyne and at the militarily crucial Battle of Aughrim in Ireland. Resistance held out, eventually forcing the guarantee of religious tolerance in the Treaty of Limerick. However, the terms were never honoured and a new monarchy was installed.


title: British Isles

text: The Kingdoms of England and Scotland were unified in 1707 creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. Following an attempted republican revolution in Ireland in 1798, the Kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain were unified in 1801, creating the United Kingdom. The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands remaining outside of the United Kingdom but with their ultimate good governance being the responsibility of the British Crown (effectively the British government). Although the colonies of North America that would become the United States of America were lost by the start of the 19th century, the British Empire expanded rapidly elsewhere. A century later it would cover one-third of the globe. Poverty in the United Kingdom remained desperate, however, and industrialisation in England led to terrible conditions for the working classes. Mass migrations following the Irish Famine and Highland Clearances resulted in the distribution of the islands' population and culture throughout the world and a rapid de-population of Ireland in the second half of the 19th century. Most of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom after the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Anglo-Irish Treaty (1919–1922), with the six counties that formed Northern Ireland remaining as an autonomous region of the UK.


title: British Isles

text: There are two sovereign states in the British Isles: Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Ireland, sometimes called the Republic of Ireland, governs five-sixths of the island of Ireland, with the remainder of the island forming Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, usually shortened to simply "the United Kingdom", which governs the remainder of the archipelago with the exception of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The Isle of Man and the two Bailiwicks of the Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey, are known as the Crown Dependencies. They exercise constitutional rights of self-government and judicial independence; responsibility for international representation rests largely with the UK (in consultation with the respective governments); and responsibility for defence is reserved by the UK. The United Kingdom is made up of four constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales, forming Great Britain, and Northern Ireland in the northeast of the island of Ireland. Of these, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved governments, meaning that each has its own parliament or assembly and is self-governing with respect to certain matters set down by law. For judicial purposes, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England and Wales (the latter being one entity) form separate legal jurisdictions, with there being no single law for the UK as a whole.


title: British Isles

text: Ireland, the United Kingdom and the three Crown dependencies are all parliamentary democracies, with their own separate parliaments. All parts of the United Kingdom return Members of Parliament (MPs) to parliament in London. In addition to this, voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland return members to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh and in Cardiff and an assembly in Belfast. Governance in the norm is by majority rule; however, Northern Ireland uses a system of power sharing whereby unionists and nationalists share executive posts proportionately and where the assent of both groups is required for the Northern Ireland Assembly to make certain decisions. (In the context of Northern Ireland, unionists are those who want Northern Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom and nationalists are those who want Northern Ireland to join with the rest of Ireland.) The British monarch is the head of state of the United Kingdom, while in the Republic of Ireland the head of state is the President of Ireland.


title: British Isles

text: Ireland is the only part of the isles that is a member state of the European Union (EU). The UK was a member between 1 January 1973 and 31 January 2020, however the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands were not. Since the partition of Ireland, an informal free-travel area has existed across the island of Ireland. This area required formal recognition in 1997 during the course of negotiations for the Amsterdam Treaty of the European Union, and (together with the Crown dependencies) is now known as the Common Travel Area. As such, Ireland is not part of the Schengen Area, which allows passport-free travel between most EU member states, and is the only member state with an opt-out from the obligation to join the Schengen Zone.


title: British Isles

text: Reciprocal arrangements allow British and Irish citizens specific voting rights in the two states. In Ireland, British citizens can vote in General and local elections, but not in European Parliament elections, constitutional referendums or presidential elections (for which there is no comparable franchise in the United Kingdom). In the United Kingdom, Irish and Commonwealth citizens can vote in every election for which British citizens are eligible. In the Crown dependencies, any resident can vote in general elections, but in Jersey and the Isle of Man only British citizens can run for office. These pre-date European Union law, and in both jurisdictions go further than what was required by European Union law (EU citizens may only vote in local elections in both states and European elections in Ireland). In 2008, a UK Ministry of Justice report investigating how to strengthen the British sense of citizenship proposed to end this arrangement, arguing that "the right to vote is one of the hallmarks of the political status of citizens; it is not a means of expressing closeness between countries".


title: British Isles

text: In addition, some civil bodies are organised throughout the islands as a whole—for example, the Samaritans, which is deliberately organised without regard to national boundaries on the basis that a service which is not political or religious should not recognise sectarian or political divisions. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), a charity that operates a lifeboat service, is also organised throughout the islands as a whole, covering the waters of the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands.


title: British Isles

text: The Northern Ireland peace process has led to a number of unusual arrangements between the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. For example, citizens of Northern Ireland are entitled to the choice of Irish or British citizenship or both, and the Governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom consult on matters not devolved to the Northern Ireland Executive. The Northern Ireland Executive and the Government of Ireland also meet as the North/South Ministerial Council to develop policies common across the island of Ireland. These arrangements were made following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.


title: British Isles

text: Another body established under the Good Friday Agreement, the British–Irish Council, is made up of all of the states and territories of the British Isles. The British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly () predates the British–Irish Council and was established in 1990. Originally it comprised 25 members of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, and 25 members of the parliament of the United Kingdom, with the purpose of building mutual understanding between members of both legislatures. Since then the role and scope of the body has been expanded to include representatives from the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd (Welsh Parliament), the Northern Ireland Assembly, the States of Jersey, the States of Guernsey and the High Court of Tynwald (Isle of Man).


title: British Isles

text: The Council does not have executive powers but meets biannually to discuss issues of mutual importance. Similarly, the Parliamentary Assembly has no legislative powers but investigates and collects witness evidence from the public on matters of mutual concern to its members. Reports on its findings are presented to the Governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom. During the February 2008 meeting of the British–Irish Council, it was agreed to set up a standing secretariat that would serve as a permanent 'civil service' for the Council. Leading on from developments in the British–Irish Council, the chair of the British–Irish Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, Niall Blaney, has suggested that the body should shadow the British–Irish Council's work.


title: British Isles

text: The United Kingdom and Ireland have separate media, although British television, newspapers and magazines are widely available in Ireland, giving people in Ireland a high level of familiarity with the culture of the United Kingdom. Irish newspapers are also available in the UK, and Irish state and private television are widely available in Northern Ireland. Certain reality TV shows have embraced the whole of the islands, for example "The X Factor", seasons 3, 4 and 7 of which featured auditions in Dublin and were open to Irish voters, whilst the show previously known as "Britain's Next Top Model" became "Britain and Ireland's Next Top Model" in 2011. A few cultural events are organised for the island group as a whole. For example, the Costa Book Awards are awarded to authors resident in the UK or Ireland. The Mercury Music Prize is handed out every year to the best album from a British or Irish musician or group.


title: British Isles

text: Many globally popular sports had their modern rules codified in the British Isles, including golf, association football, cricket, rugby, snooker and darts, as well as many minor sports such as croquet, bowls, pitch and putt, water polo and handball. A number of sports are popular throughout the British Isles, the most prominent of which is association football. While this is organised separately in different national associations, leagues and national teams, even within the UK, it is a common passion in all parts of the islands. Rugby union is also widely enjoyed across the islands with four national teams from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The British and Irish Lions is a team chosen from each national team and undertakes tours of the Southern Hemisphere rugby-playing nations every four years. Ireland plays as a united team, represented by players from both Northern Ireland and the Republic. These national rugby teams play each other each year for the Triple Crown as part of the Six Nations Championship. Also, since 2001, the professional club teams of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy and South Africa compete against each other in the United Rugby Championship.


title: British Isles

text: The Ryder Cup in golf was originally played between a United States team and a team representing Great Britain and Ireland. From 1979 onwards this was expanded to include the whole of Europe.


title: British Isles

text: London Heathrow Airport is Europe's busiest airport in terms of passenger traffic, and the Dublin-London route is the busiest air route in Europe collectively, the busiest route out of Heathrow and the second-busiest international air route in the world. The English Channel and the southern North Sea are the busiest seaways in the world. The Channel Tunnel, opened in 1994, links Great Britain to France and is the second-longest rail tunnel in the world.


title: British Isles

text: The idea of building a tunnel under the Irish Sea has been raised since 1895, when it was first investigated. Several potential Irish Sea tunnel projects have been proposed, most recently the "Tusker Tunnel" between the ports of Rosslare and Fishguard proposed by The Institute of Engineers of Ireland in 2004. A rail tunnel was proposed in 1997 on a different route, between Dublin and Holyhead, by British engineering firm Symonds. Either tunnel, at , would be by far the longest in the world, and would cost an estimated £15 billion or €20 billion. A proposal in 2007, estimated the cost of building a bridge from County Antrim in Northern Ireland to Galloway in Scotland at £3.5bn (€5bn).


title: Herman Melville

text: Herman Melville (born Melvill; August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are "Moby-Dick" (1851); "Typee" (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and "Billy Budd, Sailor", a posthumously published novella. Although his reputation was not high at the time of his death, the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival, and "Moby-Dick" grew to be considered one of the great American novels.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler "Acushnet", but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. "Typee", his first book, and its sequel, "Omoo" (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. "Mardi" (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. "Redburn" (1849) and "White-Jacket" (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's growing literary ambition showed in "Moby-Dick" (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel "" (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, "The Confidence-Man" (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.


title: Herman Melville

text: From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. "Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War" (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic "Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land" was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella "Billy Budd" was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.


title: Herman Melville

text: Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan Melvill (1782–1832) and Maria (Gansevoort) Melvill (1791–1872). Herman was the third of eight children in a family of Scottish and Dutch descent. His siblings, who played important roles in his career as well as in his emotional life, were Gansevoort (1815–1846); Helen Maria (1817–1888); Augusta (1821–1876); Allan (1823–1872); Catherine (1825–1905); Frances Priscilla (1827–1885); and Thomas (1830–1884), who eventually became a governor of Sailors' Snug Harbor. Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Allan Melvill spent much time out of New York and in Europe as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods.


title: Herman Melville

text: Both of Melville's grandfathers were heroes of the Revolutionary War, and Melville found satisfaction in his "double revolutionary descent". Major Thomas Melvill (1751–1832) had taken part in the Boston Tea Party, and Melville's maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort (1749–1812), was famous for having commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix in New York in 1777. At the turn of the 19th century, Major Melvill did not send his son Allan (Herman's father) to college, but instead sent him to France, where he spent two years in Paris and learned to speak French fluently. In 1814, Allan, who subscribed to his father's Unitarianism, married Maria Gansevoort, who was committed to her family's more strict and biblically oriented Dutch Reformed version of the Calvinist creed. The Gansevoorts' severe Protestantism ensured that Maria was well versed in the Bible, in English as well as in Dutch, the language that the Gansevoorts spoke at home.


title: Herman Melville

text: On August 19, almost three weeks after his birth, Herman Melville was baptized at home by a minister of the South Reformed Dutch Church. During the 1820s, Melville lived a privileged, opulent life in a household with three or more servants at a time. At four-year intervals, the family moved into more spacious and elegant quarters, finally settling on Broadway in 1828. Allan Melvill lived beyond his means, on large sums that he borrowed from his father and from his wife's widowed mother. Although his wife's opinion of his financial conduct is unknown, biographer Hershel Parker says that Maria "thought her mother's money was infinite and that she was entitled to much of her portion" while her children were young. How well the parents managed to hide the truth from their children is "impossible to know", according to biographer Andrew Delbanco.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1830, the Gansevoorts ended their financial support of the Melvilles, at which point Allan's lack of financial responsibility had put him in debt to both the Melvill and Gansevoort families for a total of more than $20,000 (). But Melville biographer Newton Arvin writes that the relative happiness and comfort of Melville's early childhood depended not so much on Allan's wealth or on his profligate spending, as on the "exceptionally tender and affectionate spirit in all the family relationships, especially in the immediate circle". Arvin describes Allan as "a man of real sensibility and a particularly warm and loving father," while Maria was "warmly maternal, simple, robust, and affectionately devoted to her husband and her brood".


title: Herman Melville

text: Herman Melville's schooling began when he was five and was interrupted at age 12 by the death of his father. Around the time the Melvills moved to a newly built house at 33 Bleecker Street in Manhattan in 1824, Herman and his older brother Gansevoort were sent to the New York Male High School. In 1826, the year that Herman contracted scarlet fever, Allan Melvill described him as "very backwards in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension" at first, but his development increased its pace and Allan was surprised "that Herman proved the best Speaker in the introductory Department". In 1829, both Gansevoort and Herman were transferred to Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School, and Herman enrolled in the English Department on September 28. "Herman I think is making more progress than formerly," Allan wrote in May 1830 to Major Melvill, "and without being a bright Scholar, he maintains a respectable standing, and would proceed further, if he could only be induced to study more—being a most amiable and innocent child, I cannot find it in my heart to coerce him".


title: Herman Melville

text: Emotionally unstable and behind on paying the rent for the house on Broadway, Herman's father tried to recover by moving his family to Albany, New York, in 1830 and going into the fur business. Herman attended the Albany Academy from October 1830 to October 1831, where he took the standard preparatory course, studying reading and spelling; penmanship; arithmetic; English grammar; geography; natural history; universal, Greek, Roman and English history; classical biography; and Jewish antiquities. In early August 1831, Herman marched in the Albany city government procession of the year's "finest scholars" and was presented with a copy of "The London Carcanet", a collection of poems and prose, inscribed to him as "first best in ciphering books". As Melville scholar Merton Sealts observed,


title: Herman Melville

text: Nonetheless, Melville's time at the Academy was soon interrupted. Parker speculates he left it in October 1831 because "even the tiny tuition fee seemed too much to pay".


title: Herman Melville

text: In December, Allan Melvill returned from New York City by steamboat, but had to travel the last seventy miles in an open carriage for two days and two nights at sub-freezing temperatures. In early January, he began to show "signs of delirium", and his situation grew worse until his wife felt his suffering deprived him of his intellect. He died on January 28, 1832, two months before reaching fifty. As Herman was no longer attending school, he likely witnessed these scenes. Twenty years later he described a similar death in "Pierre".


title: Herman Melville

text: The death of Allan caused many major shifts in the family's material and spiritual circumstances. One result was the greater influence of his mother's religious beliefs. Maria sought consolation in her faith and in April was admitted as a member of the First Reformed Dutch Church. Herman's saturation in orthodox Calvinism was surely the most decisive intellectual and spiritual influence of his early life.


title: Herman Melville

text: Two months after his father's death, Gansevoort entered the cap and fur business. Uncle Peter Gansevoort, a director of the New York State Bank, got Herman a job as clerk for $150 a year (). Biographers cite a passage from "Redburn" when trying to answer what Herman must have felt then: "I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time," the narrator remarks, adding, "I must not think of those delightful days, before my father became a bankrupt ... and we removed from the city; for when I think of those days, something rises up in my throat and almost strangles me". With Melville, Arvin argues, one has to reckon with "psychology, the tormented psychology, of the decayed patrician".


title: Herman Melville

text: When Melville's paternal grandfather died on September 16, 1832, Maria and her children discovered Allan, somewhat unscrupulously, had borrowed more than his share of his inheritance, meaning Maria received only $20 (). His paternal grandmother died almost exactly seven months later. Melville did his job well at the bank; although he was only 14 in 1834, the bank considered him competent enough to be sent to Schenectady, New York on an errand. Not much else is known from this period except that he was very fond of drawing. The visual arts became a lifelong interest. Around May 1834, the Melvilles moved to another house in Albany, a three-story brick house. That same month a fire destroyed Gansevoort's skin-preparing factory, which left him with personnel he could neither employ nor afford. Instead he pulled Melville out of the bank to man the cap and fur store.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1835, while still working in the store, Melville enrolled in Albany Classical School, perhaps using Maria's part of the proceeds from the sale of the estate of his maternal grandmother in March 1835. In September of the following year, Herman was back in Albany Academy in the Latin course. He also participated in debating societies, in an apparent effort to make up as much as he could for his missed years of schooling. In this period he read Shakespeare—at least "Macbeth", whose witch scenes gave him the chance to teasingly scare his sisters. By March 1837, he was again withdrawn from Albany Academy.


title: Herman Melville

text: Gansevoort served as a role model and support for Melville throughout his life, particularly during this time trying to cobble together an education. In early 1834 Gansevoort had become a member of Albany's Young Men's Association for Mutual Improvement, and in January 1835 Melville joined him there. Gansevoort also had copies of John Todd's "Index Rerum", a blank register for indexing remarkable passages from books one had read for easy retrieval. Among the sample entries which Gansevoort made showing his academic scrupulousness was "Pequot, beautiful description of the war with," with a short title reference to the place in Benjamin Trumbull's "A Complete History of Connecticut" (Volume I in 1797, and Volume II in 1818) where the description could be found. The two surviving volumes of Gansevoort's are the best evidence for Melville's reading in this period. Gansevoort's entries include books Melville used for "Moby-Dick" and "Clarel", such as "Parsees—of India—an excellent description of their character, and religion and an account of their descent—East India Sketch Book p. 21". Other entries are on Panther, the pirate's cabin, and storm at sea from James Fenimore Cooper's "The Red Rover", Saint-Saba.


title: Herman Melville

text: The Panic of 1837 forced Gansevoort to file for bankruptcy in April. In June, Maria told the younger children they needed to leave Albany for somewhere cheaper. Gansevoort began studying law in New York City while Herman managed the farm before getting a teaching position at Sikes District School near Lenox, Massachusetts. He taught about 30 students of various ages, including some his own age.


title: Herman Melville

text: The semester over, he returned to his mother in 1838. In February he was elected president of the Philo Logos Society, which Peter Gansevoort invited to move into Stanwix Hall for no rent. In the "Albany Microscope" in March, Melville published two polemical letters about issues in vogue in the debating societies. Historians Leon Howard and Hershel Parker suggest the motive behind the letters was a youthful desire to have his rhetorical skills publicly recognized. In May, the Melvilles moved to a rented house in Lansingburgh, almost 12 miles north of Albany. Nothing is known about what Melville did or where he went for several months after he finished teaching at Sikes. On November 12, five days after arriving in Lansingburgh, Melville paid for a term at Lansingburgh Academy to study surveying and engineering. In an April 1839 letter recommending Herman for a job in the Engineer Department of the Erie Canal, Peter Gansevoort says his nephew "possesses the ambition to make himself useful in a business which he desires to make his profession," but no job resulted.


title: Herman Melville

text: Just weeks after this failure, Melville's first known published essay appeared. Using the initials "L.A.V.", Herman contributed "Fragments from a Writing Desk" to the weekly newspaper "Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser", which printed it in two installments, the first on May 4. According to Merton Sealts, his use of heavy-handed allusions reveals familiarity with the work of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Walter Scott, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore. Parker calls the piece "characteristic Melvillean mood-stuff" and considers its style "excessive enough [...] to indulge his extravagances and just enough overdone to allow him to deny that he was taking his style seriously". For Delbanco, the style is "overheated in the manner of Poe, with sexually charged echoes of Byron and "The Arabian Nights"".


title: Herman Melville

text: On May 31, 1839, Gansevoort, then living in New York City, wrote that he was sure Herman could get a job on a whaler or merchant vessel. The next day, he signed aboard the merchant ship "St. Lawrence" as a "boy" (a green hand), which cruised from New York to Liverpool. "Redburn: His First Voyage" (1849) draws on his experiences in this journey; at least two of the nine guide-books listed in chapter 30 of the book had been part of Allan Melvill's library. He arrived back in New York October 1, 1839 and resumed teaching, now at Greenbush, New York, but left after one term because he had not been paid. In the summer of 1840 he and his friend James Murdock Fly went to Galena, Illinois to see if his Uncle Thomas could help them find work. Unsuccessful, he and his friend returned home in autumn, likely by way of St. Louis and up the Ohio River.


title: Herman Melville

text: Inspired by contemporaneous popular cultural reading, including Richard Henry Dana Jr.'s new book "Two Years Before the Mast" and Jeremiah N. Reynolds's account in the May 1839 issue of "The Knickerbocker" magazine of the hunt for a great white sperm whale named Mocha Dick, Herman and Gansevoort traveled to New Bedford, where Herman signed up for a whaling voyage aboard a new ship, the "Acushnet". Built in 1840, the ship measured some 104 feet in length, almost 28 feet in breadth, and almost 14 feet in depth. She measured slightly less than 360 tons and had two decks and three masts, but no quarter galleries. The "Acushnet" was owned by Melvin O. Bradford and Philemon Fuller of Fairhaven, Massachusetts and was berthed near their office at the foot of Center Street in that town. Herman signed a contract on Christmas Day with the ship's agent as a "green hand" for 1/175th of whatever profits the voyage would yield. On Sunday the 27th, the brothers heard Reverend Enoch Mudge preach at the Seamen's Bethel on Johnny-Cake Hill, where white marble cenotaphs on the walls memorialized local sailors who had died at sea, often in battle with whales. When he signed the crew list the next day, Herman was advanced $84.


title: Herman Melville

text: On January 3, 1841, the "Acushnet" set sail. Melville slept with some twenty others in the forecastle; Captain Valentine Pease, the mates, and the skilled men slept aft. Whales were found near The Bahamas, and in March 150 barrels of oil were sent home from Rio de Janeiro. Cutting in and trying-out (boiling) a single whale took about three days, and a whale yielded approximately one barrel of oil per foot of length and per ton of weight (the average whale weighed 40 to 60 tons). The oil was kept on deck for a day to cool off, and was then stowed down; scrubbing the deck completed the labor. An average voyage meant that some forty whales were killed to yield some 1600 barrels of oil.


title: Herman Melville

text: On April 15, the "Acushnet" sailed around Cape Horn and traveled to the South Pacific, where the crew sighted whales without catching any. She then went up the coast of Chile to the region of Selkirk Island, and on May 7, near Juan Fernández Islands, she had 160 barrels. On June 23, the ship anchored for the first time since Rio, in Santa Harbor. The cruising grounds the "Acushnet" was sailing attracted much traffic, and Captain Pease not only paused to visit other whalers, but at times hunted in company with them. From July 23 into August, the "Acushnet" regularly gammed with the "Lima" from Nantucket, and Melville met William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who gave him a copy of his father's account of his adventures aboard the "Essex". Ten years later, Melville wrote in his other copy of the book: "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me".


title: Herman Melville

text: On September 25, the ship reported having 600 barrels of oil to another whaler, and in October 700 barrels. On October 24, the "Acushnet" crossed the equator to the north, and six or seven days later arrived at the Galápagos Islands. This short visit would be the basis for "The Encantadas". On November 2, the "Acushnet" and three other American whalers were hunting together near the Galápagos Islands; Melville later exaggerated that number in Sketch Fourth of "The Encantadas". From November 19 to 25, the ship anchored at Chatham's Isle, and on December 2 reached the coast of Peru and anchored at Tombez near Paita, with 570 barrels of oil on board. On December 27, the "Acushnet" sighted Cape Blanco, off Ecuador. Point St. Elena was sighted the next day, and on January 6, 1842, the ship approached the Galápagos Islands from the southeast. From February May 13 to 7, seven sightings of sperm whales were recorded, but none was killed. From early May to early June, the "Acushnet" cooperatively set about its whaling endeavors several times with the "Columbus" of New Bedford, which also took letters from Melville's ship; the two ships were in the same area just south of the Equator. On June 16, the "Acushnet" carried 750 barrels of oil and sent home 200 on the "Herald the Second", and, on June 23, she reached the Marquesas Islands and anchored at Nuku Hiva.


title: Herman Melville

text: In the summer of 1842, Melville and his shipmate Richard Tobias Greene ("Toby") jumped ship at Nuku Hiva Bay. Melville's first book, "Typee" (1846), is based on his stay in or near the Taipi Valley. By around mid-August, Melville had left the island aboard the Australian whaler "Lucy Ann", bound for Tahiti, where he took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in the native "Calabooza Beretanee". In October, he and crew mate John B. Troy escaped Tahiti for Eimeo. He then spent a month as beachcomber and island rover ("omoo" in Tahitian), eventually crossing over to Moorea. He drew on these experiences for "Omoo", the sequel to "Typee". In November, he contracted to be a seaman on the Nantucket whaler "Charles & Henry" for a six-month cruise (November 1842 – April 1843), and was discharged at Lahaina, Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands, in May 1843.


title: Herman Melville

text: After four months of working several jobs in Hawaii, including as a clerk, Melville joined the US Navy on August 20, as an ordinary seaman on the frigate . During the next year, the homeward bound ship visited the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Valparaiso, and then, from summer to fall 1844, Mazatlan, Lima, and Rio de Janeiro, before reaching Boston on October 3. Melville was discharged on October 14. This Navy experience is used in "White-Jacket" (1850), Melville's fifth book.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's wander-years created what biographer Arvin calls "a settled hatred of external authority, a lust for personal freedom", and a "growing and intensifying sense of his own exceptionalism as a person", along with "the resentful sense that circumstance and mankind together had already imposed their will upon him in a series of injurious ways". Scholar Robert Milder believes the encounter with the wide ocean, where he was seemingly abandoned by God, led Melville to experience a "metaphysical estrangement" and influenced his social views in two ways: first, that he belonged to the genteel classes, but sympathized with the "disinherited commons" he had been placed among and, second, that experiencing the cultures of Polynesia let him view the West from an outsider's perspective.


title: Herman Melville

text: Upon his return, Melville regaled his family and friends with his adventurous tales and romantic experiences, and they urged him to put them into writing. Melville completed "Typee", his first book, in the summer of 1845 while living in Troy, New York. His brother Gansevoort found a publisher for it in London, where it was published in February 1846 by John Murray in his travel adventure series. It became an overnight bestseller in England, then in New York, when it was published on March 17 by Wiley & Putnam.


title: Herman Melville

text: In the narrative, Melville likely extended the period of time he had spent on the island and also incorporated material from source books he had assembled. Milder calls "Typee" "an appealing mixture of adventure, anecdote, ethnography, and social criticism presented with a genial latitudinarianism that gave novelty to a South Sea idyll at once erotically suggestive and romantically chaste".


title: Herman Melville

text: An unsigned review in the "Salem Advertiser" written by Nathaniel Hawthorne called the book a "skilfully managed" narrative by an author with "that freedom of view ... which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own". Hawthorne continued: This book is lightly but vigorously written; and we are acquainted with no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life, in that unadulterated state of which there are now so few specimens remaining. The gentleness of disposition that seems akin to the delicious climate, is shown in contrast with the traits of savage fierceness...He has that freedom of view—it would be too harsh to call it laxity of principle—which renders him tolerant of codes of morals that may be little in accordance with our own, a spirit proper enough to a young and adventurous sailor, and which makes his book the more wholesome to our staid landsmen.


title: Herman Melville

text: Pleased but not overwhelmed by the adulation of his new public, Melville later expressed concern that he would "go down to posterity ... as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'!" The writing of "Typee" brought Melville back into contact with his friend Greene—Toby in the book—who wrote confirming Melville's account in newspapers. The two corresponded until 1863, and in his final years Melville "traced and successfully located his old friend" for a further meeting of the two. In March 1847, "Omoo", a sequel to "Typee", was published by Murray in London, and in May by Harper in New York. "Omoo" is "a slighter but more professional book," according to Milder. "Typee" and "Omoo" gave Melville overnight renown as a writer and adventurer, and he often entertained by telling stories to his admirers. As the writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis wrote, "With his cigar and his Spanish eyes, he "talks" Typee and Omoo, just as you find the flow of his delightful mind on paper". In 1847 Melville tried unsuccessfully to find a "government job" in Washington.


title: Herman Melville

text: In June 1847, Melville and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Knapp Shaw were engaged, after knowing each other for approximately three months. Melville had first asked her father, Lemuel Shaw, for her hand in March, but was turned down at the time. Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, had been a close friend of Melville's father, and his marriage with Melville's aunt Nancy was prevented only by her death. His warmth and financial support for the family continued after Allan's death. Melville dedicated his first book, "Typee", to him. Lizzie was raised by her grandmother and an Irish nurse. Arvin suggests that Melville's interest in Lizzie may have been stimulated by "his need of Judge Shaw's paternal presence". They were married on August 4, 1847. Lizzie described their marriage as "very unexpected, and scarcely thought of until about two months before it actually took place". She wanted to be married in church, but they had a private wedding ceremony at home to avoid possible crowds hoping to see the celebrity. The couple honeymooned in the then-British Province of Canada, and traveled to Montreal. They settled in a house on Fourth Avenue in New York City (now called Park Avenue).


title: Herman Melville

text: According to scholars Joyce Deveau Kennedy and Frederick James Kennedy, Lizzie brought to their marriage a sense of religious obligation, an intent to make a home with Melville regardless of place, a willingness to please her husband by performing such "tasks of drudgery" as mending stockings, an ability to hide her agitation, and a desire "to shield Melville from unpleasantness". The Kennedys conclude their assessment with:


title: Herman Melville

text: Biographer Robertson-Lorant cites "Lizzie's adventurous spirit and abundant energy," and she suggests that "her pluck and good humor might have been what attracted Melville to her, and vice versa". An example of such good humor appears in a letter about her not yet used to being married: "It seems sometimes exactly as if I were here for a "visit". The illusion is quite dispelled however when Herman stalks into my room without even the ceremony of knocking, bringing me perhaps a button to sew on, or some equally romantic occupation". On February 16, 1849, the Melvilles' first child, Malcolm, was born.


title: Herman Melville

text: In March 1848, "Mardi" was published by Richard Bentley in London, and in April by Harper in New York. Nathaniel Hawthorne thought it a rich book "with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life". According to Milder, the book began as another South Sea story but, as he wrote, Melville left that genre behind, first in favor of "a romance of the narrator Taji and the lost maiden Yillah," and then "to an allegorical voyage of the philosopher Babbalanja and his companions through the imaginary archipelago of Mardi".


title: Herman Melville

text: In October 1849, "Redburn" was published by Bentley in London, and in November by Harper in New York. The bankruptcy and death of Allan Melvill, and Melville's own youthful humiliations surface in this "story of outward adaptation and inner impairment". Biographer Robertson-Lorant regards the work as a deliberate attempt for popular appeal: "Melville modeled each episode almost systematically on every genre that was popular with some group of antebellum readers," combining elements of "the picaresque novel, the travelogue, the nautical adventure, the sentimental novel, the sensational French romance, the gothic thriller, temperance tracts, urban reform literature, and the English pastoral". His next novel, "White-Jacket", was published by Bentley in London in January 1850, and in March by Harper in New York.


title: Herman Melville

text: The earliest surviving mention of "Moby-Dick" is from a May 1, 1850, letter in which Melville told fellow sea author Richard Henry Dana Jr. "I am half way in the work." In June, he described the book to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall. The original manuscript has not survived. That summer, Melville read Thomas Carlyle, borrowing copies of "Sartor Resartus" (1833–34) and "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History" (1841) from the library of his friend Evert Duyckinck. These readings proved significant, occurring as Melville radically transformed his initial plan for the novel over the next several months, conceiving what Delbanco described in 2005 as "the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer".


title: Herman Melville

text: From August 4 to 12, 1850, the Melvilles, Sarah Morewood, Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other literary figures from New York and Boston came to Pittsfield to enjoy a period of parties, picnics, dinners, and the like. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his publisher James T. Fields joined the group while Hawthorne's wife stayed at home to look after the children. On one picnic outing organized by Duyckinck, Hawthorne and Melville sought shelter from the rain together and had a deep, private conversation. Melville had been given a copy of Hawthorne's short story collection "Mosses from an Old Manse", though he had not yet read it. Melville then avidly read it and wrote a review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," which appeared in two installments, on August 17 and 24, in "The Literary World". Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black". He repeatedly compared Hawthorne to Shakespeare, and urged that "men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio." The critic Walter Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing "Moby-Dick"" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading". Later that summer, Duyckinck sent Hawthorne copies of Melville's three most recent books. Hawthorne read them, as he wrote to Duyckinck on August 29 that Melville in "Redburn" and "White-Jacket" put the reality "more unflinchingly" before his reader than any writer, and he thought "Mardi" was "a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life". But he cautioned, "It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better".


title: Herman Melville

text: In September 1850, Melville borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw to buy a 160-acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Melville called his new home Arrowhead because of the arrowheads that were dug up around the property during planting season. That winter, Melville paid Hawthorne an unexpected visit, only to discover he was working and "not in the mood for company". Hawthorne's wife Sophia gave him copies of "Twice-Told Tales" and, for Malcolm, "The Grandfather's Chair". Melville invited them to visit Arrowhead soon, hoping to "[discuss] the Universe with a bottle of brandy & cigars" with Hawthorne, but Hawthorne would not stop working on his new book for more than one day and they did not come. After a second visit from Melville, Hawthorne surprised him by arriving at Arrowhead with his daughter Una. According to Robertson-Lorant, "The handsome Hawthorne made quite an impression on the Melville women, especially Augusta, who was a great fan of his books". They spent the day mostly "smoking and talking metaphysics".


title: Herman Melville

text: Robertson-Lorant writes that Melville was "infatuated with Hawthorne's intellect, captivated by his artistry, and charmed by his elusive personality," but "the friendship meant something different to each of them," with Hawthorne offering Melville "the kind of intellectual stimulation he needed". They may have been "natural allies and friends," yet they were also "fifteen years apart in age and temperamentally quite different" and Hawthorne "found Melville's manic intensity exhausting at times". Bezanson identifies "sexual excitement" in all the ten letters Melville wrote to the older man. In the essay on Hawthorne's "Mosses", Melville wrote: "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul." Melville dedicated his book to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne".


title: Herman Melville

text: On October 18, 1851, "The Whale" was published in Britain in three volumes, and on November 14 "Moby-Dick" appeared in the United States as a single volume. In between these dates, on October 22, 1851, the Melvilles' second child, Stanwix, was born. In December, Hawthorne told Duyckinck, "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones." Unlike other contemporaneous reviewers of Melville, Hawthorne had seen the uniqueness of Melville's new novel and acknowledged it. In early December 1852, Melville visited the Hawthornes in Concord and discussed the idea of the "Agatha" story he had talked of with Hawthorne. This was the last contact between the two writers before Melville visited Hawthorne in Liverpool four years later when Hawthorne had relocated to England.


title: Herman Melville

text: After having borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law in September 1850 to buy a 160-acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Melville had high hopes that his next book would please the public and restore his finances. In April 1851 he told his British publisher, Richard Bentley, that his new book had "unquestionable novelty" and was calculated to have wide appeal with elements of romance and mystery. In fact, "" was heavily psychological, though drawing on the conventions of the romance, and difficult in style. It was not well received. The New York "Day Book" published a venomous attack on September 8, 1852, headlined "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY". The item, offered as a news story, reported,


title: Herman Melville

text: On May 22, 1853, Melville's third child and first daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) was born, and on or about that day Herman finished work on the Agatha story, "Isle of the Cross". Melville traveled to New York to discuss a book, presumably "Isle of the Cross", with his publisher, but later wrote that Harper & Brothers was "prevented" from publishing his manuscript because it was lost.


title: Herman Melville

text: After the commercial and critical failure of "Pierre", Melville had difficulty finding a publisher for his follow-up novel "Israel Potter". Instead, this narrative of a Revolutionary War veteran was serialized in "Putnam's Monthly Magazine" in 1853. From November 1853 to 1856, Melville published fourteen tales and sketches in "Putnam's" and "Harper's" magazines. In December 1855 he proposed to Dix & Edwards, the new owners of "Putnam's", that they publish a selective collection of the short fiction. The collection, titled "The Piazza Tales", was named after a new introductory story Melville wrote for it, "The Piazza". It also contained five previously published stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno". On March 2, 1855, the Melvilles' fourth child, Frances (Fanny), was born. In this period, his book "Israel Potter" was published.


title: Herman Melville

text: The writing of "The Confidence-Man" put great strain on Melville, leading Sam Shaw, a nephew of Lizzie, to write to his uncle Lemuel Shaw: "Herman I hope has had no more of those ugly attacks"—a reference to what Robertson-Lorant calls "the bouts of rheumatism and sciatica that plagued Melville". Melville's father-in-law apparently shared his daughter's "great anxiety about him" when he wrote a letter to a cousin, in which he described Melville's working habits: "When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him[self] to hard study many hours in the day, with little or no exercise, and this specially in winter for a great many days together. He probably thus overworks himself and brings on severe nervous affections". Shaw advanced Melville $1,500 from Lizzie's inheritance to travel four or five months in Europe and the Holy Land.


title: Herman Melville

text: From October 11, 1856, to May 20, 1857, Melville made a six-month Grand Tour of Europe and the Mediterranean. While in England, in November 1856, he briefly reunited for three days with Hawthorne, who had taken the position of United States Consul at Liverpool, at that time the hub of Britain's Atlantic trade. At the nearby coast resort of Southport, amid the sand dunes where they had stopped to smoke cigars, they had a conversation which Hawthorne later described in his journal: "Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he 'pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated' [...] If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us."


title: Herman Melville

text: The Mediterranean part of the tour took in the Holy Land, which inspired his epic poem "Clarel." During the tour he visited Mount Hope a Christian farm near Jaffa. On April 1, 1857, Melville published his last full-length novel "The Confidence-Man". This novel, subtitled "His Masquerade", has won general acclaim in modern times as a complex and mysterious exploration of issues of fraud and honesty, identity and masquerade. However, when it was published, it received reviews ranging from the bewildered to the denunciatory.


title: Herman Melville

text: To repair his faltering finances, Melville took up public lecturing from late 1857 to 1860. He embarked upon three lecture tours and spoke at lyceums, chiefly on Roman statuary and sightseeing in Rome. Melville's lectures, which mocked the pseudo-intellectualism of lyceum culture, were panned by contemporary audiences. On May 30, 1860, Melville boarded the clipper "Meteor" for California, with his brother Thomas at the helm. After a shaky trip around Cape Horn, Melville returned to New York alone via Panama in November. Later that year, he submitted a poetry collection to a publisher but it was not accepted, and is now lost. In 1863, he bought his brother's house at 104 East 26th Street in New York City and moved there.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1864, Melville visited the Virginia battlefields of the American Civil War. After the war, he published "Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War" (1866), a collection of 72 poems that has been described as "a polyphonic verse journal of the conflict". The work did not do well commercially—of the print run of 1,260 copies, 300 were sent as review copies, and 551 copies were sold—and reviewers did not realize that Melville had purposely avoided the ostentatious diction and fine writing that were in fashion, choosing to be concise and spare.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1866, Melville became a customs inspector for New York City. He held the post for 19 years and had a reputation for honesty in a notoriously corrupt institution. (Unbeknownst to Melville, his position was sometimes protected by future American president Chester A. Arthur, then a customs official who admired Melville's writing but never spoke to him.) During these years, Melville suffered from nervous exhaustion, physical pain, and frustration, and would sometimes, in the words of Robertson-Lorant, behave like the "tyrannical captains he had portrayed in his novels", perhaps even beating his wife Lizzie when he came home after drinking. In 1867 Malcolm, the Melvilles' older son, died in his bedroom at home at the age of 18 from a self-inflicted gun shot, perhaps intentional, perhaps accidental. In May 1867, Lizzie's brother Sam, who shared his family's fear for Melville's sanity, tried to arrange for her leave Melville. Lizzie was to visit her family in Boston and assert to a court that her husband was insane. But Lizzie, whether to avoid the social shame divorce carried at the time or because she still loved her husband, refused to go along with the plan.


title: Herman Melville

text: Though Melville's professional writing career had ended, he remained dedicated to his writing. He spent years on what Milder called "his autumnal masterpiece" "Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage" (1876), an 18,000-line epic poem inspired by his 1856 trip to the Holy Land. It is among the longest single poems in American literature. The title character is a young American student of divinity who travels to Jerusalem to renew his faith. One of the central characters, Rolfe, is similar to Melville in his younger days, a seeker and adventurer, while the reclusive Vine is loosely based on Hawthorne, who had died twelve years before. Publication of 350 copies was funded with a bequest from his uncle in 1876, but sales failed miserably and the unsold copies were burned when Melville was unable to buy them at cost. Critic Lewis Mumford found an unread copy in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut".


title: Herman Melville

text: Although Melville's own income remained limited, in 1884, Lizzie received a legacy that enabled him to buy a steady stream of books and prints each month. Melville retired on December 31, 1885, after several of his wife's relatives further supported the couple with supplementary legacies and inheritances. On February 22, 1886, Stanwix, their younger son, died in San Francisco at age 36, from tuberculosis. In 1889, Melville became a member of the New York Society Library.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville had a modest revival of popularity in England when readers rediscovered his novels. He published two collections of poems inspired by his early experiences at sea, with prose head notes. Intended for his relatives and friends, each had a print run of 25 copies. The first, "John Marr and Other Sailors", was published in 1888, followed by "Timoleon" in 1891.


title: Herman Melville

text: He died the morning of September 28, 1891. His death certificate shows "cardiac dilation" as the cause. He was interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City. There were few obituaries.


title: Herman Melville

text: "The New York Times" initial death notice called his masterpiece ""Mobie Dick"", which later was erroneously taken to mean that he was unappreciated at his time of death. But there were some appreciations. The "Times", for instance, published a substantial article of appreciation on October 2. The author said that thinking back to Melville's books that were so much read forty years earlier, there is "no difficulty determining why they were then read and talked about," but the difficulty is "to discover why they are read and talked about no longer."


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville left a volume of poetry, "Weeds and Wildings", and a sketch, "Daniel Orme", unpublished at the time of his death. His wife also found pages for an unfinished novella, titled "Billy Budd". Melville had revised and rearranged the manuscript in several stages, leaving the pages in disarray. Lizzie could not decide her husband's intentions (or even read his handwriting in some places) and abandoned attempts to edit the manuscript for publication. The pages were stored in a family breadbox until 1919 when Melville's granddaughter gave them to Raymond Weaver. Weaver, who initially dismissed the work's importance, published a quick transcription in 1924. This version, however, contained many misreadings, some of which affected interpretation. It was an immediate critical success in England, then in the United States. In 1962, the Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts published a critical reading text that was widely accepted. It was adapted as a stage play on Broadway in 1951, then an opera, and in 1961 as a film.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's writing style shows both consistencies and enormous changes throughout the years. His development "had been abnormally postponed, and when it came, it came with a rush and a force that had the menace of quick exhaustion in it". As early as "Fragments from a Writing Desk", written when Melville was 20, scholar Sealts sees "a number of elements that anticipate Melville's later writing, especially his characteristic habit of abundant literary allusion". "Typee" and "Omoo" were documentary adventures that called for a division of the narrative in short chapters. Such compact organization bears the risk of fragmentation when applied to a lengthy work such as "Mardi", but with "Redburn" and "White Jacket," Melville turned the short chapter into a concentrated narrative.


title: Herman Melville

text: Some chapters of "Moby-Dick" are no more than two pages in standard editions, and an extreme example is Chapter 122, consisting of a single paragraph of 36 words. The skillful handling of chapters in "Moby-Dick" is one of the most fully developed Melvillean signatures, and is a measure of his masterly writing style. Individual chapters have become "a touchstone for appreciation of Melville's art and for explanation" of his themes. In contrast, the chapters in "Pierre", called Books, are divided into short-numbered sections, seemingly an "odd formal compromise" between Melville's natural length and his purpose to write a regular romance that called for longer chapters. As satirical elements were introduced, the chapter arrangement restores "some degree of organization and pace from the chaos". The usual chapter unit then reappears for "Israel Potter", "The Confidence-Man" and even "Clarel", but only becomes "a vital part in the whole creative achievement" again in the juxtaposition of accents and of topics in "Billy Budd".


title: Herman Melville

text: Newton Arvin points out that only superficially the books after "Mardi" seem as if Melville's writing went back to the vein of his first two books. In reality, his movement "was not a retrograde but a spiral one", and while "Redburn" and "White Jacket" may lack the spontaneous, youthful charm of his first two books, they are "denser in substance, richer in feeling, tauter, more complex, more connotative in texture and imagery". The rhythm of the prose in "Omoo" "achieves little more than easiness; the language is almost neutral and without idiosyncrasy", while "Redburn" shows an improved ability in narrative which fuses imagery and emotion.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's early works were "increasingly baroque" in style, and with "Moby-Dick" Melville's vocabulary had grown superabundant. Walter Bezanson calls it an "immensely varied style". According to critic Warner Berthoff, three characteristic uses of language can be recognized. First, the exaggerated repetition of words, as in the series "pitiable", "pity", "pitied", and "piteous" (Ch. 81, "The Pequod Meets the Virgin"). A second typical device is the use of unusual adjective-noun combinations, as in "concentrating brow" and "immaculate manliness" (Ch. 26, "Knights and Squires"). A third characteristic is the presence of a participial modifier to emphasize and to reinforce the already established expectations of the reader, as the words "preluding" and "foreshadowing" ("so still and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene ..." "In this foreshadowing interval ...").


title: Herman Melville

text: After his use of hyphenated compounds in "Pierre", Melville's writing gives Berthoff the impression of becoming less exploratory and less provocative in his choices of words and phrases. Instead of providing a lead "into possible meanings and openings-out of the material in hand," the vocabulary now served "to crystallize governing impressions," the diction no longer attracted attention to itself, except as an effort at exact definition. The language, Berthoff continues, reflects a "controlling intelligence, of right judgment and completed understanding". The sense of free inquiry and exploration which infused his earlier writing and accounted for its "rare force and expansiveness," tended to give way to "static enumeration". By comparison to the verbal music and kinetic energy of "Moby-Dick", Melville's subsequent writings seem "relatively muted, even withheld" in his later works.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's paragraphing in his best work Berthoff considers to be the virtuous result of "compactness of form and free assembling of unanticipated further data", such as when the mysterious sperm whale is compared with Exodus's invisibility of God's face in the final paragraph of Chapter 86 ("The Tail"). Over time Melville's paragraphs became shorter as his sentences grew longer, until he arrived at the "one-sentence paragraphing characteristic of his later prose". Berthoff points to the opening chapter of "The Confidence-Man" for an example, as it counts fifteen paragraphs, seven of which consist of only one elaborate sentence, and four that have only two sentences. The use of similar technique in "Billy Budd" contributes in large part, Berthoff says, to its "remarkable narrative economy".


title: Herman Melville

text: In Nathalia Wright's view, Melville's sentences generally have a looseness of structure, easy to use for devices as catalogue and allusion, parallel and refrain, proverb and allegory. The length of his clauses may vary greatly, but the narrative style of writing in "Pierre" and "The Confidence-Man" is there to convey feeling, not thought. Unlike Henry James, who was an innovator of sentence ordering to render the subtlest nuances in thought, Melville made few such innovations. His domain is the mainstream of English prose, with its rhythm and simplicity influenced by the King James Bible. Another important characteristic of Melville's writing style is in its echoes and overtones. Melville's imitation of certain distinct styles is responsible for this. His three most important sources, in order, are the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton. Direct quotation from any of the sources is slight; only one sixth of his Biblical allusions can be qualified as such because Melville adapts Biblical usage to his own narrated textual requirements of clarifying his plot.


title: Herman Melville

text: The Biblical elements in Melville's style can be divided into three categories. In the first, allusion is more within the narrative rather than formal quotation. Several preferred Biblical allusions appear repeatedly throughout his body of work, taking on the nature of refrains. Examples are the injunctions to be 'as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves,' 'death on a pale horse,' 'the man of sorrows', the 'many mansions of heaven;' proverbs 'as the hairs on our heads are numbered,' 'pride goes before a fall,' 'the wages of sin is death;' adverbs and pronouns as 'verily, whoso, forasmuch as; phrases as come to pass, children's children, the fat of the land, vanity of vanities, outer darkness, the apple of his eye, Ancient of Days, the rose of Sharon.' Second, there are paraphrases of individual and combined verses. Redburn's "Thou shalt not lay stripes upon these Roman citizens" makes use of language of the Ten Commandments in Ex.20 and Pierre's inquiry of Lucy: "Loveth she me with the love past all understanding?" combines John 21:15–17, and Philippians 4:7. Third, certain Hebraisms are used, such as a succession of genitives ("all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob"), the cognate accusative ("I dreamed a dream", "Liverpool was created with the Creation"), and the parallel ("Closer home does it go than a rammer; and fighting with steel is a play without ever an interlude"). This passage from "Redburn" shows how these ways of alluding interlock and result in a texture of Biblical language though there is very little direct quotation:


title: Herman Melville

text: In addition to this, Melville successfully imitates three Biblical strains: the apocalyptic, the prophetic and the sermonic narrative tone of writing. Melville sustains the apocalyptic tone of anxiety and foreboding for a whole chapter of "Mardi." The prophetic strain is expressed by Melville in "Moby-Dick", most notably in Father Mapple's sermon. The tradition of the Psalms is imitated at length by Melville in "The Confidence-Man".


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1849, Melville acquired an edition of Shakespeare's works printed in a font large enough for his tired eyes, which led to a deeper study of Shakespeare that greatly influenced the style of his next book, "Moby-Dick" (1851). The critic F. O. Matthiessen found that the language of Shakespeare far surpasses other influences upon the book, in that it inspired Melville to discover his own full strength. On almost every page, debts to Shakespeare can be discovered. The "mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing" at the end of "Cetology" (Ch. 32) echo the famous phrase in "Macbeth:" "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/ Signifying nothing". Ahab's first extended speech to the crew, in the "Quarter-Deck" (Ch. 36) is practically blank verse and so is Ahab's soliloquy at the beginning of "Sunset" (Ch. 37):'I leave a white and turbid wake;/ Pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail./ The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm/ My track; let them; but first I pass.' Through Shakespeare, Melville infused "Moby-Dick" with a power of expression he had not previously expressed. Reading Shakespeare had been "a catalytic agent" for Melville, one that transformed his writing from merely reporting to "the expression of profound natural forces". The extent to which Melville assimilated Shakespeare is evident in the description of Ahab, Matthiessen continues, which ends in language that seems Shakespearean yet is no imitation: 'Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked from the skies and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!' The imaginative richness of the final phrase seems particularly Shakespearean, "but its two key words appear only once each in the plays...and to neither of these usages is Melville indebted for his fresh combination". Melville's diction depended upon no source, and his prose is not based on anybody else's verse but on an awareness of "speech rhythm".


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's mastering of Shakespeare, Matthiessen finds, supplied him with verbal resources that enabled him to create dramatic language through three essential techniques. First, the use of verbs of action creates a sense of movement and meaning. The effective tension caused by the contrast of "thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds" and "there's that in here that still remains indifferent" in "The Candles" (Ch. 119) makes the last clause lead to a "compulsion to strike the breast," which suggests "how thoroughly the drama has come to inhere in the words;" Second, Melville took advantage of the Shakespearean energy of verbal compounds, as in "full-freighted". Third, Melville employed the device of making one part of speech act as another, for example, 'earthquake' as an adjective, or turning an adjective into a noun, as in "placeless".


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's style, in Nathalia Wright's analysis, seamlessly flows over into theme, because all these borrowings have an artistic purpose, which is to suggest an appearance "larger and more significant than life" for characters and themes that are in fact unremarkable. The allusions suggest that beyond the world of appearances another world exists, one that influences this world, and where ultimate truth can be found. Moreover, the ancient background thus suggested for Melville's narratives – ancient allusions being next in number to the Biblical ones – invests them with a sense of timelessness.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's financial success as a writer during his lifetime was not great, relative to his posthumous success; over his entire lifetime Melville's writings earned him just over $10,000 (). Melville's travelogues based on voyages to the South Seas and stories based on his time in the merchant marine and navy led to some initial success, but his popularity declined dramatically afterwards. By 1876, all of his books were out of print. He was viewed as a minor figure in American literature in the later years of his life and during the years immediately after his death.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville did not publish poetry until his late thirties, with "Battle-Pieces" (1866), and did not receive recognition as a poet until well into the 20th century. But he wrote predominantly poetry for about 25 years, twice as long as his prose career. The three novels of the 1850s that Melville worked on most seriously to present his philosophical explorations, "Moby-Dick", "Pierre", and "The Confidence Man", seem to make the step to philosophical poetry a natural one rather than simply a consequence of commercial failure. Since he turned to poetry as a meditative practice, his poetic style, even more than most Victorian poets, was not marked by linguistic play or melodic considerations.


title: Herman Melville

text: Early critics were not sympathetic. Henry Chapin, in his introduction to "John Marr and Other Poems" (1922), one of the earlier selections of Melville's poetry, said Melville's verse is "of an amateurish and uneven quality" but in it "that loveable freshness of personality, which his philosophical dejection never quenched, is everywhere in evidence," in "the voice of a true poet". The poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren became a champion of Melville as a great American poet and issued a selection of Melville's poetry in 1971 prefaced by an admiring critical essay. In the 1990s critic Lawrence Buell argued that Melville "is justly said to be nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson." and Helen Vendler remarked of "Clarel": "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'." Some critics now place him as the first modernist poet in the United States while others assert that his work more strongly suggests what today would be a postmodern view.


title: Herman Melville

text: The centennial of Melville's birth in 1919 coincided with a renewed interest in his writings known as the Melville revival where his work experienced a significant critical reassessment. The renewed appreciation began in 1917 with Carl Van Doren's article on Melville in a standard history of American literature. Van Doren also encouraged Raymond Weaver, who wrote the author's first full-length biography, "Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic" (1921). Discovering the unfinished manuscript of "Billy Budd", among papers shown to him by Melville's granddaughter, Weaver edited it and published it in a new collected edition of Melville's works. Other works that helped fan the flames for Melville were Carl Van Doren's "The American Novel" (1921), D. H. Lawrence's "Studies in Classic American Literature" (1923), Carl Van Vechten's essay in "The Double Dealer" (1922), and Lewis Mumford's biography "Herman Melville" (1929).


title: Herman Melville

text: Starting in the mid-1930s, the Yale University scholar Stanley Thomas Williams supervised more than a dozen dissertations on Melville that were eventually published as books. Where the first wave of Melville scholars focused on psychology, Williams' students were prominent in establishing Melville Studies as an academic field concerned with texts and manuscripts, tracing Melville's influences and borrowings (even plagiarism), and exploring archives and local publications. To provide historical evidence, the independent scholar Jay Leyda searched libraries, family papers, local archives and newspapers across New England and New York to document Melville's life day by day for his two-volume "The Melville Log" (1951). Sparked by Leyda and post-war scholars, the second phase of the Melville Revival emphasized research into the biography of Melville rather than accepting Melville's early books as reliable accounts.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1945, The Melville Society was founded, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the study of Melville's life and works. Between 1969 and 2003 it published 125 issues of "Melville Society Extracts", which are now freely available on the society's website. Since 1999 it has published "Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies", currently three issues a year, published by Johns Hopkins University Press.


title: Herman Melville

text: The postwar scholars tended to think that Weaver, Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, and Mumford favored Freudian interpretations which read Melville's fiction as autobiography; exaggerated his suffering in the family; and inferred a homosexual attachment to Hawthorne. They saw a different arc to Melville's writing career. The first biographers saw a tragic withdrawal after the cold critical reception for his prose works and largely dismissed his poetry. A new view emerged of Melville's turn to poetry as a conscious choice that placed him among the most important American poets. Other post-war studies, however, continued the broad imaginative and interpretive style; Charles Olson's "Call Me Ishmael" (1947) presented Ahab as a Shakespearean tragic hero, and Newton Arvin's critical biography, "Herman Melville" (1950), won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1951.


title: Herman Melville

text: In the 1960s, Harrison Hayford organized an alliance between Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, with backing from the Modern Language Association and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to edit and publish reliable critical texts of Melville's complete works, including unpublished poems, journals, and correspondence. The first volume of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of "The Writings of Herman Melville" was published in 1968 and the last in the fall of 2017. The aim of the editors was to present a text "as close as possible to the author's intention as surviving evidence permits". The volumes have extensive appendices, including textual variants from each of the editions published in Melville's lifetime, an historical note on the publishing history and critical reception, and related documents. Because the texts were prepared with financial support from the United States Department of Education, no royalties are charged, and they have been widely reprinted. Hershel Parker published his two-volume "Herman Melville: A Biography", in 1996 and 2002, based on extensive original research and his involvement as editor of the Northwestern-Newberry Melville edition.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville only gradually attracted the pioneering scholars of women's studies, gender, and sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s. Though some held that he hardly portrayed women at all, others saw the few women in his works as traditional figures representing, or even attacking, nineteenth-century gentility, sentimentality, and conventional morality. Melville's preference for sea-going tales that involved almost only males has been of interest to scholars in men's studies and especially gay and queer studies. Melville was remarkably open in his exploration of sexuality of all sorts. Alvin Sandberg said that the short story "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" offers "an exploration of impotency, a portrayal of a man retreating to an all-male childhood to avoid confrontation with sexual manhood," from which the narrator engages in "congenial" digressions in heterogeneity. In line with this view, Warren Rosenberg argues the homosocial "Paradise of Bachelors" is "blind to what is real and painful in the world, and thus are superficial and sterile".


title: Herman Melville

text: David Harley Serlin observes in the second half of Melville's diptych, "The Tartarus of Maids", the narrator gives voice to the oppressed women he observes:


title: Herman Melville

text: In the end Serlin says that the narrator is never fully able to come to terms with the contrasting masculine and feminine modalities.


title: Herman Melville

text: Issues of sexuality have been observed in other works as well. Rosenberg notes Taji, in "Mardi", and the protagonist in "Pierre" "think they are saving young 'maidens in distress' (Yillah and Isabel) out of the purest of reasons but both are also conscious of a lurking sexual motive". When Taji kills the old priest holding Yillah captive, he says,


title: Herman Melville

text: In "Pierre", the motive of the protagonist's sacrifice for Isabel is admitted: "womanly beauty and not womanly ugliness invited him to champion the right". Rosenberg argues,


title: Herman Melville

text: Rosenberg says that Melville fully explores the theme of sexuality in his major epic poem, "Clarel". When the narrator is separated from Ruth, with whom he has fallen in love, he is free to explore other sexual (and religious) possibilities before deciding at the end of the poem to participate in the ritualistic order represented by marriage. In the course of the poem, "he considers every form of sexual orientation – celibacy, homosexuality, hedonism, and heterosexuality – raising the same kinds of questions as when he considers Islam or Democracy".


title: Herman Melville

text: Some passages and sections of Melville's works demonstrate his willingness to address all forms of sexuality, including the homoerotic, in his works. Commonly noted examples from "Moby-Dick" are the "marriage bed" episode involving Ishmael and Queequeg, who sleep with their arms wrapped around each other (Chapter 4, "The Counterpane" and Chapter 10, "A Bosom Friend"); and the "Squeeze of the Hand" (Chapter 94) describing the camaraderie of sailors' extracting spermaceti from a dead whale. "Clarel" recognizes the homoerotic potential of its eponymous protagonist, including, in a fairly explicit passage, an erection provoked to him by the figure of a male interlocutor, Lyonesse. In addition, Rosenberg notes that Billy Budd's physical attractiveness is described in quasi-feminine terms: "As the Handsome Sailor, Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was something analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted from the provinces and brought into competition with the highborn dames of the court".


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville has been useful in the field of law and literature. The chapter Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish in "Moby-Dick", for instance, challenges concepts of property rights. In "Billy Budd", a handsome and popular young sailor strikes and inadvertently kills the ship's master-at-arms. The ship's captain immediately convenes a court-martial at which he urges the court to convict and sentence Billy to death. Critics debate Melville's intention. Some see the contradiction between unbending legalism and malleable moral principles. Other critics have argued that the captain manipulated and misrepresented the applicable laws.


title: Herman Melville

text: Melville's work often touched on themes of communicative expression and the pursuit of the absolute among illusions. As early as 1839, in the juvenile sketch "Fragments from a Writing Desk", Melville explores a problem which would reappear in the short stories "Bartleby" (1853) and "Benito Cereno" (1855): the impossibility to find common ground for mutual communication. The sketch centers on the protagonist and a mute lady, leading scholar Sealts to observe: "Melville's deep concern with expression and communication evidently began early in his career".


title: Herman Melville

text: According to scholar Nathalia Wright, Melville's characters are all preoccupied by the same intense, superhuman and eternal quest for "the absolute amidst its relative manifestations," an enterprise central to the Melville canon: "All Melville's plots describe this pursuit, and all his themes represent the delicate and shifting relationship between its truth and its illusion". It is not clear, however, what the moral and metaphysical implications of this quest are, because Melville did not distinguish between these two aspects. Throughout his life Melville struggled with and gave shape to the same set of epistemological doubts and the metaphysical issues these doubts engendered. An obsession for the limits of knowledge led to the question of God's existence and nature, the indifference of the universe, and the problem of evil.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1982, the Library of America (LOA) began publication. In honor of Melville's central place in American culture, the very first volume contained "Typee", "Omoo", and "Mardi". The first volumes published in 1983 and 1985 also contained Melville's work, in 1983 "Redburn", "White-Jacket", and "Moby-Dick" and in 1985 "Pierre", "Israel Potter", "The Confidence-Man", "Tales", and "Billy Budd". LOA did not publish his complete poetry until 2019.


title: Herman Melville

text: On August 1, 1984, as part of the Literary Arts Series of stamps, the United States Postal Service issued a 20-cent commemorative stamp to honor Melville. The setting for the first day of issue was the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 1985, the New York City Herman Melville Society gathered at 104 East 26th Street to dedicate the intersection of Park Avenue South and 26th Street as Herman Melville Square. This is the street where Melville lived from 1863 to 1891 and where, among other works, he wrote "Billy Budd". Melville's house in Lansingburgh, New York, houses the Lansingburgh Historical Society.


title: Herman Melville

text: In 2010, a species of extinct giant sperm whale, "Livyatan melvillei", was named in honor of Melville. The paleontologists who discovered the fossil were fans of "Moby-Dick" and dedicated their discovery to the author.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Larissa de Macedo Machado (born March 30, 1993), known professionally as Anitta, is a Brazilian singer, songwriter and television host. She is regarded as one of biggest Brazilians artists of all time, as one of the first artists in the country to have risen an international career. She rose to national fame with the release of her single "Show das Poderosas" in 2013.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: After achieving national commercial success with her debut profissional single "Meiga e Abusada" in 2012, she signed a recording contract with Warner Music Brazil in January 2013. In July of the same year, she released her self-titled debut album which produced four hit singles on local charts and was certified platinum. Her second studio album, "Ritmo Perfeito" (2014), also achieved a minor commercial success in the country, and was accompanied by the release of her first live album "Meu Lugar", on the same day. In 2015, she released her third studio album entitled "Bang", which was certified platinum and spawned four successful singles "Deixa Ele Sofrer", the title track "Bang", "Essa Mina é Louca" and "Cravo e Canela". The album played a crucial role on establishing her almost dominant position in Brazilian music charts.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Between 2016 and 2018, Anitta embarked on numerous collaborations with international artists such as Nile Rodgers, Maluma, Iggy Azalea, Major Lazer, Alesso and J Balvin, among others. In 2017, she released her first song in spanish language "Paradinha", which catapulted her partial transition to Spanish-language Latin pop and reggaeton music. Her collaboration on the same year with Colombian singer J Balvin, "Downtown", became her breakthrough song in several Spanish-speaking markets. In 2019, she joined several collaborations with artists such as Madonna, Sofía Reyes, Rita Ora, Luis Fonsi, Ozuna and Black Eyed Peas. She later received critical acclaim for her trilingual fourth studio visual album, "Kisses" (2019), which earned her a nomination for the Latin Grammy Award for Best Urban Music Album.Three months after, her Spanish language single "Envolver" released on late 2021, from her fifth studio album "Versions of Me" (2022), topped the Global Top 50 chart on Spotify, making Anitta the first Brazilian and Latin American artist with a solo song to do so. Anitta still ranked 1st on Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart and 2nd on Billboard Global, being the first brazilian artist to lead a global music chart.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Anitta was named by the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte (APCA) as the revelation of the year in music in 2013. She has received numerous accolades and several nominations at the Latin Grammy Awards, Latin American Music Awards, "Billboard" Latin Music Awards and Premios Lo Nuestro awards. Anitta has won seven MTV Europe Music Awards, and became the first Brazilian artist to win the award for Best Latin American Act. In 2017, she was ranked as one of the most influential celebrities in social media according to "Billboard". In 2022, Anitta became the first Brazilian artist to win a MTV Video Music Awards category,and the also a American Music Awards.She was also the first brazilian to make a performance on the two shows. Obtaining several international certifications for sales and several nominations in various awards around the world, Anitta received a Grammy nomination for the first time in the main categories as Best New Artist at the 2023 Grammy Awards.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Anitta was born and raised in Honório Gurgel neighborhood, a region with one of the lowest HDIs in the Rio de Janeiro city, the youngest daughter of Míriam Macedo and Mauro Machado; her brother Renan Machado currently acts as one of her music producers and jointly manages her career. Larissa had a poor childhood and was raised by divorced parents, with her mother gaining custody.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: She began her singing career at the age of 8 when, after the insistence of her maternal grandparents, she started singing in the choir of the Santa Luzia's Parish, located in her neighborhood. At age 11, she took her first English classes and was already showing signs of pursuing an academic career and demonstrated above-average intelligence. She later received free dance lessons provided by her mother's teacher. When she was in high school, she finished a technical course in public administration after graduating from one of the most prestigious public schools in the country,the Dom Pedro II School. A year later, she decided to pursue an artistic career. That same year, she was the winner of the "Best New Artist" award given by the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte, as the main body of culture in Brazil.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Anitta's stage name was inspired by the character Anita, from the book "Presença de Anita" adapted as a teleseries by Rede Globo in 2001. She thought the character "amazing" because "[she] could be sexy without looking vulgar; girl and woman at the same time".


title: Anitta (singer)

text: funk carioca producer Renato Azevedo (known as Batutinha).She was invited by to record some demo tapes for him, as he had seen some of her home videos on Youtube. After being approved,she was nominated to sign a contract with the independent and specialized label in funk, Furacão 2000.Some time latter, she released her first single "Eu Vou Ficar", which was played to exhaustion on local radio stations in Rio de Janeiro and the song was included on the series "Armagedom", which included other artists from the musical niche.Advised by her producer, she decided to put another "t" in the stage name and the and the acronym MC. A year later, the song "Fica Só Olhando" was included on the second version of the collection.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Her first televised appearance was on May 16, 2012, on TV program "Cante se Puder", on SBT, where she sang the single "Extravasa", a song recorded by axé music singer,Claudia Leitte, inside a beer cup. In June 2012,she chose to not renew the Furacão 2000 contract and signed with K2L Entertainment office.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: In January 2013, Anitta signed a big recording contract with Warner Music Group and released the single Meiga e Abusada.The song exploded after being added to the telenovela Amor à Vida soundtrack and became one of the most requested songs in Brazilian radio stations in early 2013. A music video for the song was recorded in Las Vegas, and directed by American director Blake Farber. The song was chosen as lead single of her self-titled debut album was released in June 2013.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: The song "Show das Poderosas" received considerable attention by the media in May 2013, becoming the most watched music video on YouTube in Brazil, surpassing 160 million views in less than a week after the release.The impact also helped to music on charts, which remained for weeks at the top of the best selling in iTunes Brazil, and making it the third most played song on the radio in the country during 2013. At the time, with that, the singer's fee per presentation increased to US$10.000


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Anitta announced in 2013 that she would start her first big national tour on that year and in some special shows she will record her first live CD.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: The sales to the tickets for the special series of shows, went on sale in November 2013. The event took place in Rio de Janeiro at HSBC Arena on February 15, 2014, and was attended by about 10,000 people. The album was previously titled "Fantástico Mundo de Anitta" (Anitta's World), but was later renamed to "Meu Lugar" (My Place),after the release of the song "Quem Sabe" on iTunes. The song "Blá Blá Blá" was released as the lead single from the album on March 23, 2014. Despite the success in minor proportions,the song reached the number two on the Hot 100 Airplay chart in Brazil. The album was released on June 4, 2014, just a day after the release of her second studio album, "Ritmo Perfeito".


title: Anitta (singer)

text: The second single from the project was a song featuring rapper Projota titled "Cobertor", which reached a discret number 43 on Brazilian charts. The following single "Na Batida" was released in 31 July 2014. Its music video reached 1 million views on YouTube after just 24 hours. The single had a minor success on charts, peaking at number four on the Hot 100 Airplay chart. Other singles released from the album were "Ritmo Perfeito" and "No Meu Talento", featuring MC Guimê. In April 2014, she made her acting debut as Helena Boccato on comedy film "Copa de Elite". In August 2014, she founded her own management company, Rodamoinho Produções Artísticas. In December, she also starred as goddess Solaris on television film "Didi e o Segredo dos Anjos".


title: Anitta (singer)

text: Her third studio album "Bang" was released in October 2015. It was elected by "Billboard Brasil" as one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Its album cover art was signed by Giovanni Bianco, the same author of some most know taken photos by the american singer Madonna. "Bang" debuted at number three on the Brazilian albums chart with 40,000 copies sold at its first week. The album's sold 300,000 copies as of May 2016, surpassing sales of her debut album, which has sold 170,000 copies. It was also certified Platinum by the Associação Brasileira de Produtores de Discos (ABPD). The first single of the album, "Deixa Ele Sofrer", which was released on July 16, 2015, and reached the top of the iTunes Brazil chart. The song also made Anitta the first Brazilian singer to occupy the top of Spotify Brazil.


title: Anitta (singer)

text: The album lead single, "Bang", was her first international success, staying at number one on iTunes and Spotify for several days, and its music video becoming an international viral video and receiving over 320 million views on YouTube. Other singles released from the album were "Essa Mina É Louca" and "Cravo e Canela". In October 2015, the artist won the EMA Worldwide Act Latin America, being the first Brazilian artist to win the award. A collaboration with Jota Quest and Nile Rodgers, entitled "Blecaute", was released in November 2015.