1830 Father's business collapses; family moves to Albany
1832 Father, Allan Melvill, dies
1834 Finishes school
1835 Working as a clerk, he attends Albany Classical School; becomes active member of a local debating society
1837 Brother Gansevoort goes bankrupt with family business; family moves to Lansingburgh, New York; HM teaches country school.
1839 (June) Becomes cabin boy on St. Lawrence, a merchant ship sailing from New York City for Liverpool, England
1841 (January) Sails on whaler Acushnet from New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a voyage to the South Seas
1842 (June) Acushnet anchors in Marquesas Islands (present-day French Polynesia); (July) Melville and a companion jump ship; (August) registers on Australian whaler Lucy Ann; (November) Signs as harpooner on his last whaler, Charles amp; Henry, out of Nantucket.
1843 After working for a while as a clerk in Honolulu, he signs as a seaman on United States
1844 (October) Discharged from United States in Boston MA
1846 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
1847 Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas
(August) marries Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of chief justice of Massachusetts
1849 Mardi
Redburn, His First Voyage
1850 White-Jacket
1851 Moby-Dick
1852 Pierre
1853 Fire at his publishers destroys most of his books; “Bartleby the Scrivener”
1854 “The Encantadas”
1855 Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile;
“Benito Cereno”
1856 Took tour of Europe and the Levant;
The Piazza Tales
1857 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
1860 Takes a tour with his brother Thomas, captain of the clipper “Meteor,” around Cape Horn
1866 Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War
HM appointed a district inspector of customs
1867 son Malcolm commits suicide by shooting himself
1886 Second son, Stanwix, who went to sea in 1869, dies in a San Francisco hospital
1891 writes Billy Budd, Sailor, which is not published until 1924; dies of a heart attack on September 28, in New York, New York.