did Herman Melville have herpes?

Question

i need to know for a project, and a friend told me he did.

Answer 1

I never heard of herpes as a "venereal disease" until the 1970s at least, so I doubt that Melville had that.
Herman Melville did seem to be concerned about the fact that the white race was spreading venereal diseases to other groups. I do not know whether he had a venereal disease himself.

Answer 2

2

Answer 3

American author, best-known for his novels of the sea and his masterpiece MOBY-DICK (1851), a whaling adventure dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. "I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb," Melville wrote to Hawthorne. The work was only recognized as a masterpiece 30 years after Melville's death. TYPEE (1846), a fictionalized travel narrative, was the author's most popular book during his lifetime. "All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the less of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it." (from Moby-Dick). Moby-Dick can be read as a thrilling sea story, an examination of the conflict between man and nature – the battle between Ahab and the whale is open to many interpretations. It is a pioneer novel but the prairie is now sea, or an allegory on the Gold Rush, but now the gold is a whale. Jorge Luis Borges has seen in the universe of Moby-Dick "a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius." (from The Total Library, 1999) Clare Spark has connected in Hunting Captain Ahab (2001) different interpretations with changing political atmosphere – depending on the point of view, Ahab has been regarded as a Promethean hero or a forefather of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. The director John Huston questions in his film version (1956) which one, Ahab or the whale, is the real Monster. Ray Bradbury, with whom Huston wrote the screenplay, had to struggle with the Screen Writers' Guild over his credits. In Bradbury's version, the whale is destructed....

Answer 4

I've never heard that. My suggestion is that if you don't find written proof, DO NOT use this "fact".