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<b>Herman Melville</b>'s (1819-91) father's bankruptcy and death in 1832 deprived him of higher-educational oppotunities and alienated him forever from a conventional view of life.He taught school, sailed to Liverpool and back, then shipped before the mast on a Pacific whaling voyage. He deserted at the Marquesas Islands, living for a month among the cannibal Typee natives. An Australian whaleship then took him to Tahiti, where he was jailed for mutiny, but he escaped and spent some months as a beachcomber. A third whaleship took him to Hawaii, where he lived for some months before sailing home with the crew of the frigate <i>United States</i>. From these adventures came his popular and increasingly imaginative travel romances: <i>Typee </i>(1846), <i>Omoo </i>(1847), the allegorical<i> Mardi </i>(1849), <i> Redburn</i> (1849), <i>White-Jacket</i> (1850), and his masterpiece, <i>Moby-Dick </i>(1851). Melville married in 1847. His later works of fiction were not sea romances and sold poorly. He gave up professional writing and for twenty years served as a customs inspector in New York, where he died. <i>Billy Budd</i>, written in his last years, was published for the first time in 1924, on the crest of a Melville revival that began about 1920 and continues to the present day a revival that has established him among the greatest American writers. <b>Elizabeth Renker </b>teachesEnglish at Ohio State University. She is the author of<i>Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. <b>Christopher Buckley </b>is a widely published essayist and the author of fifteen books, including <i>Thank Your for Smoking </i>and <i>Losing Mum and Pup</i>. At eighteen, he worked his way around the world as a deckboy aboard a Norwegian merchant ship. His first book was <i>Steaming to Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter</i>, and he has crossed the Atlantic twice aboard a sailboat and the Pacific once.
