This Week in Literary History: Moby-Dick Is Published for the First Time (as The Whale) in a Printing of Only 500 Copies

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Moby-Dick is published for the first time (as The Whale) in a printing of only 500 copies.

On October 18, 1851, Herman Melville’s sixth novel, Moby-Dick, was published in London in three volumes under the title The Whale. (It was common at the time, before international copyright laws, for American writers to publish in England first as a way to avoid pirated books.) By that time, Melville’s fortunes had been declining for some time; though his debut Typee—based on his experiences in the South Pacific—had been a critical and commercial success, his next few books were less favorably received, and his American publisher Harper & Brothers had not only refused to pay him an advance for Moby-Dick but had claimed that he owed them $700 in unsold books. 

However, English publisher Richard Bentley offered Melville £150 and “half profits” to publish the novel. Melville paid for the typesetting himself, and sent over proofs with his own revisions and edits geared toward British readers. But when Bentley published the book, a month before the American edition in a printing of only 500 copies, it looked very different from what Melville had intended. According to the Melville Electronic Library, the British text was expurgated in over 200 places, the Epilogue (in which Ishmael’s fate is revealed) was missing, the Etymology and Extracts were in the wrong place, and of course, there’s the title—which simply Melville hadn’t decided to change in time. He did, however, manage to get Bentley to include one late addition: the book’s dedication to his beloved Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It was not a hit. We may consider Moby-Dick to be one of the Great American Novels (whale chapters and all) now, but at the time, Melville’s total earnings from the book came to a mere $556.37, and when he died in 1891—not just a failed novelist but a failed poet as well—the New York Times spelled the title of his magnum opus wrong. At least he was vindicated in the end?

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The Literal (and Figurative) Whiteness of Moby Dick

The Encyclopedic Genius of Melville’s Masterpiece

Searching for Moby-Dick (and the Elusive Truths of America’s Pastime)

ESSENTIAL WISDOM

“It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness.” 

In other (old)

news this week

Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull premieres it St. Petersburg; it’s a flop, and afterward the 36-year-old writer (still hot) announces to a friend that “Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play” (October 17, 1896) • Famous goalkeeper Albert Camus  wins the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 44 (October 17, 1957) • Ray Bradbury’s perennially bannable classic Fahrenheit 451 is published (October 19, 1953) • Dorothy Parker reviews A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner in The New Yorker—rather unfavorably (October 20, 1928) • Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is published, after some editing (October 21, 1940) • Norman Mailer is arrested for civil disobedience during the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam’s march on the Pentagon (October 21, 1967) • Jean-Paul Sarte explains why he would not accept the Nobel Prize, writing in Le Figaro that “the writer must refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution” (October 22, 1964) • Mark Twain receives an honorary doctorate of literature from Yale University (October 23, 1901) • Boris Pasternak is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, which he would be forced to renounce only a few days later (October 23, 1958)

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“I’m a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people’s lives.”

–NTOZAKE SHANGE

Born this week in 1948

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” 

– URSULA K. LE GUIN

Born this week in 1929

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