An Initially Damp U.S. Reception for 'Moby Dick'

This is the anniversary of a conspicuous failure in American literary history: Moby Dick was published in the U.S., and it did not sell many copies. Herman Melville's masterpiece had already been published in Britain with the epilogue — the ending — omitted. There was no mention of how the narrator finally survived a shipwreck. So British reviewers thought it was stupid, which dampened the reception in the U.S. The book had to wait years to be recognized as a classic.