Moby Dick or The Whale (1851), written by Herman Melville, is considered an outstanding work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Born in New York City in 1819 into the American aristocracy, Herman Melville started to write in the winter of 1844-45, aged twenty-five. He wrote nine novels plus many short stories in eleven years, and initially with considerable commercial success. He wrote Typee (1846), which was a bestseller, as was the sequel Omoo (1847), after which he wrote Mardi (1849). He was known to have read Rabelais and for being deeply inspired by Shakespeare. In his final years he had been working on the manuscript of Billy Budd Sailor, which was left unfinished at his death and published only in 1924.