“You Never Know” — More on “Moby Dick”

On Monday, I celebrated the opening of Moby Dick, which is generally regarded as a ‘Great American Novel’ and one of the literary classics.

Now, that is. Because it certainly wasn’t that way in the author, Herman Melville’s, lifetime.

Moby Dick was first published in 1851, and although it received some positive notice in the UK, American reviewers were generally hostile. At that time, it was a commercial failure and was out of print by the time of Melville’s death in 1891.

According to that org...