American writer Herman Melville was BOTD in 1819. Born in New York City to a prominent political family, his father’s early death bankrupted the family, and they relocated to Albany. He worked as a bank clerk and a farmer to support his family, surveying at Lansingburgh Academy. When a job on the Erie Canal project failed to materialise, he joined a merchant ship as “cabin boy”, sailing for Liverpool in 1839. He later joined a whaling ship on a voyage to the South Pacific, jumping ship in the Marquesas Islands and briefly imprisoned in a Tahitian jail for his role in a mutiny. Returning to America in 1844, he published two highly romanticised novels based on his travels, Typee and Omoo, which became commercial successes. After his brother’s death, he assumed leadership of his family, marrying Elizabeth Shaw in 1847 and making a living as a writer and critic. His 1850 novel White-Jacket, a polemic about abuses in the US Navy, was highly acclaimed. In 1850, he developed a fan-crush on Nathaniel Hawthorne, by then a literary star for his novel The Scarlet Letter. Reviewing Hawthorne’s story collection, Melville wrote “Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul…. [He] expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and … shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Melville quickly bought a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, near Hawthorne’s home, and they developed a close, erotically-charged friendship. In 1851, Melville published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, a sprawling, stylistically inventive and deeply strange epic about the sailor Captain Ahab relentlessly pursuing a great white whale. Poorly reviewed, it failed to find an audience, requiring Melville to work as a customs inspector to support his family. After a prolonged period of ill health and the death of two of his children, he retired from public life, dying in obscurity in 1891 aged 72. His work was largely forgotten until the “Melville Revival” of the 1920s, timed with the centenary of Melville’s birth. Now regarded as one of America’s greatest novelists, his writings have become classics of 19th century literature. Moby-Dick has been read variously as an allegory about the dangers of (white male) obsession and the triumph of the human spirit. Melville’s frequent homoerotic references, double entendres and phallic references, combined with his bromance with Hawthorne, has prompted extensive speculation about his sexuality. Also of note is his unfinished novella Billy Budd, a disturbing tale of a sadistic master-at-arms who persecutes a beautiful young naval cadet, possibly to mask his own homoerotic attraction. First published in 1924, it was adapted into an opera in 1951 by gay composer Benjamin Britten, with a libretto by Eric Crozier and E. M. Forster that leans into the story’s tortured homoeroticism.