Melville Publishes Moby-Dick: A Literary Masterpiece Emerges

Herman Melville's Moby-Dick arrived in American bookshops on November 14, 1851, and was met with confusion, hostility, and commercial failure so complete that the author spent the remaining four decades of his life in near-total obscurity. The novel that would eventually be recognized as perhaps the greatest work of American literature sold fewer than 3,200 copies during Melville's lifetime. Melville was 32 and riding a wave of success from earlier adventure novels like Typee and Omoo when he began working on a whaling story. The book that emerged over eighteen months of intense composition bore almost no resemblance to the straightforward sea yarn his publisher expected. Moby-Dick was a sprawling, genre-defying work that blended adventure narrative with philosophical meditation, scientific treatise, Shakespearean soliloquy, and dark comedy. Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale operated simultaneously as a gripping adventure story and an allegory about the limits of human will against an indifferent universe. Contemporary reviewers were baffled. The London Athenaeum called it "an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact." American critics were kinder but tepid. The book's fame in the British market was further damaged when the London edition, published a month earlier under the title The Whale, accidentally omitted the epilogue, leaving readers wondering how the narrator had survived to tell the story. Sales were dismal. Melville's publisher eventually reported that the novel had earned him just $556.37 in royalties. Melville continued writing but never recovered commercially. He spent his final nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, virtually forgotten by the literary world. When he died in 1891, the New York Times obituary misspelled his name.