Herman Melville In 1850 while writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne's publisher introduced him to another writer who was in the midst of a novel. This was Herman Melville, the book Moby Dick. Hawthorne and Melville became good friends at once, for despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they had a great deal in common. Melville was a New Yorker, born in 1819, one of eight children of a merchant of distinguished lineage. His father, however, lost all his money and died when the boy was 12. Herman left school at 15, worked briefly as a bank clerk, and in 1837 went to sea. For 18 months, in 1841 and 1842, he was crewman on the whaler Acushnet. Then he jumped ship in the South Seas. Fo