Q1678Herman Melville's whaling novel was mocked or ignored on publication in 1851, and sold barely three thousand copies in his lifetime. He died in obscurity working as a customs inspector. It is now called one of the great novels.
Reviewers found it shapeless and strange — a novel that stops mid-story to explain rope, or the anatomy of a whale. Melville's earlier sea adventures had sold far better, and audiences wanted more of those. He wrote for another forty years to almost no readership, took a job on the New York docks, and his obituary misspelled his name. A revival in the 1920s reversed the verdict completely. What ruined it commercially — the digressions, the refusal to behave like an adventure story — is now the reason it is admired.
