Short answers, pulled from the story.
Herman Melville was an American writer and poet of the American Renaissance period, born on the 1st of August 1819 and died on the 28th of September 1891. His best-known works are Moby-Dick, Typee, and the posthumously published novella Billy Budd.
Herman Melville's most famous book is Moby-Dick, published in the United States on the 14th of November 1851 and in Britain as The Whale on the 18th of October 1851. It would eventually be considered one of the Great American Novels, though it did not find an audience during his lifetime.
By 1876 all of Herman Melville's books were out of print, and over his entire lifetime his writing earned him just over $10,000. He spent his last working years as a customs inspector for New York City and was viewed as a minor literary figure at the time of his death in 1891.
The Herman Melville revival was a renewed interest in his writings that coincided with the centennial of his birth in 1919. It began with Carl Van Doren's 1917 article and grew through Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography and the publication of the previously unfinished Billy Budd in 1924.
Herman Melville drew on real voyages, including the whaler Acushnet, which he joined as a green hand in 1841 before jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands. These experiences shaped Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket, and his time on the Acushnet fed into Moby-Dick.
Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne in August 1850 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and dedicated Moby-Dick to him. Melville wrote ten letters to the older Hawthorne and reunited with him at Southport in November 1856, where Hawthorne recorded that Melville had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated."