On November 14, 1851, an American writer named Herman Melville held the first U.S. copy of his new novel Moby-Dick. It was nearly 600 pages long, packed with sailors, storms, and a giant white whale, and it had taken him 18 months to write in a farmhouse in Massachusetts. Melville had based the book on his own years working on whaling ships, plus the true and terrifying story of the whaleship Essex, which had been rammed and sunk by an enormous sperm whale in 1820. The new book told of a one-legged captain named Ahab chasing a whale called Moby Dick across the oceans of the world.
Readers did not know what to make of it. The novel mixed pirate-style adventure with long chapters about how whaling worked, jokes, plays, sermons, and dreamy passages about the color white. Critics called it weird. It sold only about 3,200 copies during Melville's lifetime, and by the time he died in 1891 he was almost completely forgotten. He had spent his later years working as a customs inspector on the docks of New York, scribbling poems no one read.
Then, in the 1920s, a new generation of readers rediscovered Moby-Dick and decided it was secretly one of the greatest American novels ever written. Today the book is studied in classrooms around the world, its opening line, Call me Ishmael, is one of the most famous in literature, and Moby Dick the whale has shown up in cartoons, comic books, and even a Star Trek movie. A novel that flopped in 1851 ended up swimming straight into immortality.
