It’s the birthday of Herman Melville (1819-1891), whose masterpiece Moby Dick (1851) is considered the Great American Novel by pretty much everyone except the students assigned to read it, who tend to skip the parts about the skeletal system of the whale.

(NB: I highly recommend not skipping those parts. It gives you the moral high ground over those who have skipped them, which is invaluable on those exceedingly rare occasions when it comes up. It’s like being able to say you’ve read Infinite Jest. Ahem.)

Melville was born in New York City, the third of eight children, and the family moved to Albany in 1830 when the family business failed; two years later, Melville’s father died, and the rest of his childhood was about trying to earn money and yet study a bit. He clerked, he farmed, he helped his brother in business; he taught but disliked it.

In 1839, Melville did a stint as a cabin boy on a merchant ship headed for Liverpool, but it didn’t take. Then in 1841, he sailed out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a ship called the Acushnet. (Gesundheit.) His subsequent adventures in French Polynesia fired his imagination. First he and a friend jumped ship at Nuku Hiva (one of the Marquesas Islands) and hung out for a time with some lovely if possibly cannibalistic natives. Then he boarded another whaler and took part in a teensy bit of mutiny that landed him in jail in Tahiti, but it turns out it’s very easy to escape from Tahitian jails. (Note to self.) He eventually signed on with another whaler and even the U.S. Navy.

Melville returned home in 1845, having had Big Formative Spiritual Experiences while wandering the seas, and began to write about it. His first novel, Typee (1846), idealized his time in French Polynesia; Omoo, the sequel, followed in 1947. Both were successful and gave him instant fame. He followed with Mardi (1849, less successful), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850). In the meantime, he was becoming BFFs (and neighbors) with Nathaniel Hawthorne, but Melville was too intense and Hawthorne said “Chill” and things consequently chilled between them. Nonetheless, their relationship influenced Melville’s writing of Moby-Dick, which was published in London as The Whale and in the U.S. as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.

Moby-Dick sold only 3,200 copies during Melville’s life, and his reputation (and finances) sank during his lifetime. But Melville had not only written one of the greatest novels in history, he had provided loads of fodder for future graduate students and for cartoonist Gary Larson. Melville died at 72, and his final novel, Billy Budd, was not published until 1924. In 2017, Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan credited Moby-Dick as one of the three novels that have influenced him the most.

Have a sunny, sandcastle kind of day, if you haven’t read Moby-Dick for goodness’ sake get started, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.