1819–1891

New York was a seaport town when Herman Melville lived here, and he was a sailor as much as a writer. Between his birth and death in New York City, he spent much of his life at or near the sea. His most important novel is Moby–Dick; other noted works include Typee and Billy Budd, Sailor. New York changed drastically during Melville’s life as a bureaucracy of legal, clerical, and financial services grew up around the shipping industry, and he even worked as a customs inspector on the docks from 1867–1885. His experience with this new bureaucracy is reflected in Bartleby the Scrivener, a darkly comic story about an enigmatic copyist working in downtown New York.