Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, by Herman Melville was published in 1851. In fact, today, November 14, marks the 163rd anniversary of the novel's first U.S. printing. It was not a blockbuster at first glance; in fact, it was out of print by the time that Melville passed away in 1891, with only about 3200 copies sold during his lifetime. It was, by any account, a literary failure.
It's a comforting story, even. After all, who could read a book that involved hundreds of pages of whale arcana, along with a ripping good story about men on a boat, hunting the ultimate obsession, the white whale? Who could fall into the weird, completely new way that Melville structured the book, so that it's drama, theater, tragedy, comedy, everything the Greeks wrote about and everything that Shakespeare and The Bible made into heightened language, into Scripture?
