Herman Melville Publishes Moby-Dick in the US

Context

By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States had become the world's leading whaling nation, with fleets sailing from ports such as New Bedford and Nantucket to harvest sperm whales for oil that lit homes and lubricated machinery. The industry supported thousands of jobs and generated substantial wealth while exposing sailors to long voyages, diverse crews, and the dangers of the open ocean. At the same time, American letters were entering a period later called the American Renaissance, in which writers explored Romantic themes of individual will, the sublime power of nature, and moral ambiguity.

What Happened

Herman Melville, who had gone to sea as a young man between 1841 and 1844 and drawn on those experiences for earlier books such as Typee and Omoo, began drafting the novel in February 1850 while living in New York. After moving to Pittsfield in the Berkshires that summer, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work deepened Melville's ambitions for the manuscript; the two writers discussed literature intensively, and Melville dedicated the finished book to Hawthorne. He completed revisions in the fall of 1851, incorporating material on cetology, shipboard life, and philosophical digressions. The British edition appeared first on October 18 as The Whale in three volumes from Richard Bentley, with some passages altered; the American edition followed on November 14 under the title Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in a single volume of 635 pages from Harper & Brothers.

Aftermath

Contemporary American reviews were largely unfavorable, faulting the book's length, its mixture of genres, and its departures from conventional narrative. Sales were modest, with roughly three thousand copies sold in the first years, and the novel soon fell out of print. Melville continued to publish but never regained the modest success of his earlier sea tales during his lifetime.

Legacy

Rediscovered in the twentieth century after the 1919 centennial of Melville's birth, Moby-Dick came to be regarded as a central work of American literature and a prime example of the Great American Novel. Its portrayal of obsession, multicultural shipboard society, and the clash between human ambition and natural forces has influenced writers from William Faulkner to contemporary novelists, while scholars continue to examine its engagement with race, class, religion, and industrial capitalism.