Moby-Dick Was a Flop in Melville's Lifetime
Quick answer: Moby-Dick sold poorly, reviewers mocked it, and Melville died a forgotten customs inspector. How the great flop of 1851 became a classic decades too late.
Picture a customs inspector on the New York docks in the 1870s, checking cargo manifests for four dollars a day. Twenty-five years earlier this same man had been briefly famous across two continents as the writer who had lived among Pacific islanders and turned it into bestselling adventure. Now colleagues had no idea he had ever published a book. Herman Melville held that customs post for nineteen years, and when he died in 1891 the small newspaper notices treated him as a curiosity from a distant literary past. One item famously misprinted his name.
Between the early fame and the long obscurity sits Moby-Dick, published in 1851, mocked or shrugged at by many reviewers, and a commercial disappointment for the rest of its author's life. It is now on nearly every list of the greatest novels in English. The gap between those two facts, and what Melville did inside that gap, is one of the most instructive stories a discouraged writer can read.
The young man who lived among cannibals
Melville's career opened fast. Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), drawn from his years at sea and his weeks among the Typee people of the Marquesas, made him a minor celebrity, the exotic young sailor-author. Publishers wanted more of the same. Instead his books grew stranger and more ambitious, and his sales moved in the opposite direction.
By 1850 he was writing the whaling novel, deep in debt, farming at Arrowhead in Massachusetts, and newly under the spell of his neighbour Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the finished book would be dedicated. His letters to Hawthorne from this period are unusually frank about the trap he felt closing. 'Dollars damn me,' he wrote in 1851, complaining that what he most wanted to write would not pay, and what would pay he could not bring himself to write.
1851: the wrong reviews at the wrong time
Moby-Dick appeared in London in October 1851 as The Whale, and in New York a month later. The London edition carried a costly printing error: the epilogue, in which Ishmael survives to tell the tale, was left out. British reviewers, reading a first-person narrative whose narrator apparently drowns with everyone else, mocked the book for violating basic storytelling logic. The misfortune was not Melville's fault, but the sneering crossed the Atlantic ahead of the American edition.
Reception at home was mixed rather than uniformly hostile, yet the commercial verdict was plain. The book is widely reported to have sold only around three thousand copies during Melville's lifetime, and his total earnings from the American edition are usually put at little more than five hundred dollars. His follow-up, Pierre (1852), was savaged outright, and one New York paper ran its review under a headline questioning the author's sanity. His market value never recovered.
Nineteen years at the customs house
Melville did not stop writing; he stopped being read. He turned to poetry, publishing Battle-Pieces (1866), a collection about the Civil War, and later Clarel (1876), a book-length poem of pilgrimage in the Holy Land so long that almost nobody finished it, printed with money left by an uncle. That same year of 1866 he took the customs inspector post in New York, and he kept it until 1885, by several accounts refusing chances at easier money and quietly resisting the small corruptions of the job.
When he died in September 1891 he had been so thoroughly forgotten that the obituary notices were brief and sometimes inaccurate. In a drawer he left the manuscript of a final short novel about a sailor condemned by the letter of the law, unfinished and unpublished. His wife Elizabeth preserved it. It would wait more than thirty years for a reader.
The revival he never saw
The turn came, and it is worth being honest about why: partly scholarship, partly timing, partly luck. The centenary of Melville's birth in 1919 prompted critics to look again. Raymond Weaver published the first full biography in 1921, and while working in the family papers he found the manuscript in the drawer. Billy Budd was finally published in 1924, a third of a century after its author's death.
The 1920s wanted exactly what 1851 had rejected: a wild, digressive, metaphysical book that broke every rule of tidy fiction. D. H. Lawrence wrote admiringly about Melville in 1923, modernist writers claimed him, and within a generation Moby-Dick had moved from failure to fixture. The book never changed. The readers did. That is the uncomfortable, oddly comforting engine of this whole story: quality and reception run on separate clocks, and a writer controls only one of them.
What a working writer can take from it
The first takeaway is about identity. Melville lost his audience, his income from fiction and his public name, and he still filed manuscripts in drawers and wrote an epic poem nobody asked for. He separated being a writer from being a successful writer, and that separation is what left Billy Budd in the drawer for Weaver to find. If he had defined himself by his reviews, there would have been nothing to revive.
The second is about ambition. Melville's flop was not a failure of craft but a refusal to repeat a formula that worked. Every writer eventually faces that fork: another Omoo, or the whale. Choosing the whale cost him his career and gained the language one of its great books. Nobody can promise you the second part of that trade, but the story at least proves that a cold reception is evidence of nothing. The only unrecoverable outcome is the manuscript that never leaves the house, which is exactly why sending work out on a schedule, to editors or to a contest that reads every entry, beats waiting for confidence to arrive.
Where to start with Melville
Moby-Dick rewards a slow read, and poets in particular should watch what Melville does with rhythm in the famous opening chapter and in 'The Whiteness of the Whale', prose that scans like blank verse. If the novel's size intimidates, start with Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), a short masterpiece about a copyist who politely declines to exist on his employer's terms, and arguably the best story ever written about quiet refusal. Battle-Pieces shows his underrated poetry, and Billy Budd, the book from the drawer, makes a fitting last stop.
What poets can take from this
- Judge your work by the best readers you can find, not the loudest reviews of the season.
- Keep finished manuscripts safe and labelled; Billy Budd existed in 1891 but was only found in 1919.
- Expect the market to punish your most ambitious book, and write it anyway with your eyes open.
- Build an income that does not depend on your art, so a flop cannot stop the next book.
- Reread one 'failed' classic a year to recalibrate your fear of bad reception.
- When a book dies commercially, mourn briefly, then start the next one; Melville wrote for forty more years.
Try it yourself
Write a poem set on the day a great book goes out of print, told from the point of view of the last warehouse copy waiting to be pulped.
Questions
How many copies of Moby-Dick sold in Melville's lifetime?
It is widely reported that only around three thousand copies sold before Melville's death in 1891, earning him little more than five hundred dollars from the American edition. Exact figures vary by source, but every account agrees the book was a commercial failure for its author.
Why did Moby-Dick fail when it was first published?
Several reasons stacked up. The first London edition accidentally omitted the epilogue, so reviewers mocked a first-person story whose narrator seemed to die. The book also defied the adventure formula readers expected from Melville, mixing whaling narrative with philosophy, drama and cetology. Tastes only caught up with it in the 1920s.
Did Melville know Moby-Dick would become a classic?
There is no evidence he expected the scale of his posthumous fame, which began with the 1919 centenary and Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography. His letters to Hawthorne show he knew he had written something extraordinary, but he died in 1891, decades before the revival, working in obscurity as a retired customs inspector.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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