The Whale Book That Sank

In November 1851, Herman Melville published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. He was thirty-two years old and at the height of his powers. He had poured everything he knew — about whaling, about the sea, about obsession, about God and the universe — into a novel of unprecedented ambition and scope.

The reviews were mixed to hostile. One London critic called it "an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact." An American reviewer described it as "so much trash." The book sold approximately 3,000 copies in Melville's lifetime, earning him about $1,260 in total royalties. By the time he died in 1891, it was out of print, and his obituary in the New York Times misspelled his name.

This is perhaps the most spectacular failure of literary judgment in the history of the English language. The book that nobody wanted is now universally recognized as the greatest American novel, and one of the five or six greatest novels ever written in any language.

A Sailor Who Became a Writer Who Became a Sailor Again

Melville went to sea at nineteen because his family was broke and he had no better options. He spent four years on whaling ships and merchant vessels, jumped ship in the South Pacific, lived among cannibals in the Marquesas Islands, and came home with enough material for a lifetime of fiction.

His first two novels — Typee and Omoo — were exotic adventure stories based on his Pacific experiences, and they sold well. Then he began to grow. Each subsequent novel was more ambitious, more experimental, and less popular than the last. Mardi (1849) was a philosophical allegory that bewildered readers who wanted more South Seas adventure. Moby-Dick was the culmination of this trajectory — a novel so vast and strange that it contained cetology lectures, Shakespearean soliloquies, philosophical meditations, and a narrative voice that shifted registers with a freedom that would not be seen again until Joyce (Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work, 2005).

After Moby-Dick failed, Melville published Pierre (1852), which was received even worse. He wrote The Confidence-Man (1857), his most bitter and brilliant satire, to near-total silence. Then he essentially stopped publishing fiction and took a job as a customs inspector at the New York docks, a position he held for nineteen years.

The Resurrection

The Melville revival began in the 1920s, when scholars and critics — including Raymond Weaver, Lewis Mumford, and later F.O. Matthiessen — rediscovered Moby-Dick and recognized what it was: a work of genius that had been seventy years ahead of its audience.

What makes Moby-Dick the Great American Novel is not the whale or the sea or the adventure. It is the scope of the questioning. Ahab's pursuit of the White Whale is a pursuit of meaning in a universe that may have none. The novel asks whether human will can impose order on chaos, whether obsession is a form of madness or the only rational response to the incomprehensibility of existence, and whether the universe is indifferent, malevolent, or simply beyond human understanding (F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, 1941).

Melville died thinking he had failed. His last work of fiction, the novella Billy Budd, was found in manuscript on his desk after his death and not published until 1924. It is a masterpiece.

He wrote the Great American Novel. Nobody noticed. He went back to the docks. The whale surfaced eventually.