Herman Melville

Before he was a novelist, Melville was a runaway: a failed bank clerk who signed onto a whaling ship out of New Bedford in 1841, jumped it in the Marquesas Islands, and lived for weeks among islanders reputed to be cannibals. Typee, his first book, turned that escapade into a bestseller and made him, briefly, a literary celebrity.

Neighbors in the Berkshires, he and Nathaniel Hawthorne traded long walks and letters; Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to him in gratitude for a friendship that curdled almost as fast as his career did. Pierre, the novel that followed, was savaged so badly it nearly ended his fiction writing; Bartleby, the Scrivener, the Wall Street clerk who 'would prefer not to,' is the era's quiet epitaph.

He spent nineteen years afterward as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poetry nobody read. Billy Budd was found unfinished in a tin breadbox after his death and not published until 1924, the same decade that rediscovered Moby-Dick and made him, too late, essential.