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60 free Herman Melville trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Herman Melville trivia quiz covers the whole life of the writer who died almost forgotten in 1891 and was rediscovered as the author of the Great American Novel. It begins with the New York boyhood cut short by his father's bankruptcy and death, the years as a bank clerk, teacher and 'green hand', the whaler Acushnet, jumping ship in the Marquesas, the Tahitian jail and the US Navy frigate that brought him home. It then follows his career: the overnight fame of Typee and Omoo, the marriage to Lemuel Shaw's daughter, the farm at Arrowhead and the friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, the magazine years that produced 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' and 'Benito Cereno', The Confidence-Man, the customs-house decades, the poetry (Battle-Pieces and the 18,000-line Clarel), the family tragedies, and the manuscript of Billy Budd found in a breadbox and published in 1924 during the Melville revival. There are a few Moby-Dick questions here, but for the whale itself, try our dedicated Moby-Dick quiz. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on Melville and his works, and each explanation adds one further detail. Play, see your score, and share it with the readers in your group chat.
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Q 01Where was Herman Melville born on August 1, 1819?
Manhattan
He was the third of eight children of importer Allan Melvill; the family added the 'e' later.
Q 02Melville's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, took part in which famous event?
The Boston Tea Party
His maternal grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, defended Fort Stanwix in 1777, giving Melville a 'double revolutionary descent'.
Q 03What language did the Gansevoort side of Melville's family speak at home?
Dutch
His mother's severe Dutch Reformed Calvinism became a decisive influence after his father's death.
Q 04Melville's father Allan died in January 1832 after what?
Travelling 70 miles in an open carriage in freezing weather
He fell into delirium; twenty years later Melville described a similar death in Pierre.
Q 05After his father's death, young Melville worked as a clerk at what kind of institution?
A bank
His uncle Peter Gansevoort got him the $150-a-year job at the New York State Bank; he was later pulled out to run the family fur store.
Q 06Under what initials did Melville publish his first known essay, 'Fragments from a Writing Desk', in 1839?
L.A.V.
It appeared in two installments in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser.
Q 07On which merchant ship did Melville first go to sea in 1839, sailing to Liverpool?
St. Lawrence
The voyage became the basis of Redburn: His First Voyage.
Q 08Which new whaler, 104 feet long, did Melville sign aboard on Christmas Day 1840 at New Bedford?
Acushnet
He signed as a green hand for 1/175th of the profits and sailed on January 3, 1841.
Q 09Which book by Richard Henry Dana Jr. helped inspire Melville to go whaling?
Two Years Before the Mast
He was also inspired by Reynolds's Knickerbocker account of the white whale Mocha Dick.
Q 10Mocha Dick, the white whale that inspired Moby-Dick, was usually found off which country?
Chile
By Reynolds's account the albino sperm whale survived at least 100 skirmishes with whalers before it was killed.
Q 11At sea in 1841, Melville met the son of which whaleship Essex survivor, who gave him his father's account?
Owen Chase
Melville later wrote that reading it 'upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me'.
Q 12What sank the Nantucket whaleship Essex in 1820?
A sperm whale
The survivors resorted to cannibalism; the story fed directly into Moby-Dick.
Q 13Where did Melville and his shipmate Toby jump ship in the summer of 1842?
Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas
His stay in or near the Taipi Valley became Typee.
Q 21Why did the Melvilles hold a private wedding at home in 1847 rather than in church?
To avoid crowds hoping to see the celebrity author
They honeymooned in Canada and settled on Fourth Avenue, now Park Avenue.
Q 22Which 1849 novel was Melville's first not based on his own experiences, and was not well received?
Mardi
It began as a South Sea story and turned into an allegorical voyage through an imaginary archipelago.
Q 23What did Melville name the 160-acre Pittsfield farm he bought in 1850?
Arrowhead
Q 14In Tahiti, Melville took part in a mutiny and was briefly jailed in what?
The Calabooza Beretanee
He escaped to Eimeo and spent a month as a beachcomber, an 'omoo' in Tahitian.
Q 15What does the Tahitian word 'omoo' mean?
Beachcomber or island rover
Melville spent a month living that way before crossing to Moorea.
Q 16Melville came home in 1844 as an ordinary seaman aboard which US Navy frigate?
USS United States
He joined in Hawaii in August 1843; the experience became White-Jacket.
Q 17Melville's first book Typee was first published in 1846 in which city?
London
His brother Gansevoort found John Murray, who put it in his travel adventure series; Wiley & Putnam followed in New York.
Q 18Typee made Melville notorious as 'the man who lived among the' what?
Cannibals
He later worried that this was how he would go down to posterity.
Q 19Which future famous author wrote an unsigned review of Typee in the Salem Advertiser?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
He praised its 'freedom of view' about morals; the two men would meet in 1850.
Q 20Melville married Elizabeth Shaw in 1847. What was her father Lemuel's position?
Chief Justice of Massachusetts
Shaw had been a close friend of Melville's father, and Melville dedicated Typee to him.
Arrowheads were dug up around the property at planting time; he wrote Moby-Dick and Pierre there.
Q 24Near which town did Melville and Hawthorne first talk deeply while sheltering from rain at a picnic in August 1850?
Pittsfield, Massachusetts
Melville then devoured Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse and wrote the essay 'Hawthorne and His Mosses'.
Q 25To whom did Melville dedicate Moby-Dick 'in token of my admiration for his genius'?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne told Duyckinck, 'What a book Melville has written!'
Q 26Under what title was Moby-Dick first published in Britain in October 1851?
The Whale
The three-volume London edition appeared on October 18; the single-volume American Moby-Dick followed on November 14.
Q 27Which writer's Sartor Resartus and On Heroes did Melville borrow in summer 1850 as he transformed Moby-Dick?
Thomas Carlyle
Delbanco called the result 'the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer'.
Q 28The New York Day Book's venomous 1852 attack on Pierre ran under what headline?
HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY
It claimed his friends were 'taking measures to place him under treatment'.
Q 29What was the fate of Melville's 1853 manuscript 'Isle of the Cross', based on the Agatha story?
It was lost
Harper & Brothers was 'prevented' from publishing it, Melville later wrote.
Q 30What is the famous refrain of the clerk in 'Bartleby, the Scrivener'?
'I would prefer not to.'
The story was serialized anonymously in Putnam's in 1853; Robert Milder calls it 'unquestionably the masterpiece of the short fiction'.