Herman Melville - Publications and Contemporary Reactions

Publications and Contemporary Reactions

Most of Melville's novels were published first in the United Kingdom and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences, with Melville acceding to his different publishers' requirements for different audiences.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was not a financial success; the book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Israel Potter, Redburn, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, The Confidence-Man and many short stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno," and works of various genres.

Melville is less well known as a poet; he did not publish poetry until later in life. After the Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later. Tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic-length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. Among the longest single poems in American literature, Clarel, published in 1876, had an initial printing of 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut"—in other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.