Melville may have found some kind of peace in his final years. He collected artwork, an interest since childhood, visited book shops and joined the New York Society Library. He remained somewhat detached from the world. He apparently never voted, there being no record of him in voter registration books in the Municipal Archives. He showed up in the 1890 census living at home with his wife and their daughter Elizabeth (Bessie), and a single maid. In July 1891, he saw a doctor for trouble with his heart. He died of a heart attack on September 28, 1891, and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. His wife was buried beside him in 1905.
Contrary to some popular belief, the New York Times obituary did not misspell his name, it misspelled the name of what became his most famous book. It reads in its entirety: “Herman Melville died yesterday at his residence, 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, this city, of heart failure, aged seventy-two. He was the author of Typee, Omoo, Mobie Dick, and other sea-faring tales, written in earlier years. He leaves a wife and two daughters, Mrs. M. B. Thomas and Miss Melville.” As embarrassingly brief as this September 29th notice was, it was followed up on October 2nd with a more appreciative article: “There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigor of life that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was but of three or four lines. Yet forty years ago the appearance of a new book by Herman Melville was esteemed a literary event, not only throughout his own country, but so far as the English-speaking race extended.”
