Herman Melville
 Herman Melville (August 1 1819 – September 28 1891) was an American novelist poet and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd Sailor (1924).