“Call me Ishmael.”
the opening line from Moby-Dick.
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Thanks for being here! Here’s the latest installment.
“Call me Ishmael.”
- First line of Moby Dick, regarded as one of the best opening lines in all of literature. From the first three words it establishes the narrator as subjective and perhaps unreliable. He doesn’t say his name is Ishmael; he says that’s what he wants you to call him. Big difference.
Moby-Dick
Why do so many great American writers go unrecognized until after they die? As a writer myself—and an American one at that—I find it both disconcerting and inspiring.
A few examples:
Edgar Allan Poe achieved some literary fame in his 40s, but mostly as a critic and magazine editor, not for his fiction or poetry. The Raven made him well-known but earned him almost nothing. He spent years in poverty, begging for money in letters to anyone who might help, and died at 40 in 1849. His rival wrote his obituary and called him a drunk with “few or no friends.” Today, Poe is recognized as one of the most influential writers in American literature, the inventor of the detective story and a master of psychological horror. He died thinking he was a failure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald became famous at 23 when This Side of Paradise made him the voice of the Jazz Age, but he was considered a washed-up relic of the frivolous ’20s by the time he was 35. The Great Gatsby—now taught in virtually every American high school—received mixed reviews and sold poorly in his lifetime. He died of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44, deeply in debt, convinced he’d wasted his talent. At the time of his death, Gatsby was out of print. During World War II, cheap Armed Services Editions went to soldiers, who loved it. Today it has sold tens of millions of copies. Fitzgerald never knew.
Emily Dickinson might be the most extreme case. She wrote 1,800 poems but published fewer than a dozen. She lived as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts—rarely leaving her house, dressed only in white, speaking to visitors through doors. When she died in 1886 at 55, her sister discovered nearly two thousand poems, hand-bound in little booklets hidden in her room. Today she’s considered one of America’s greatest poets, a revolutionary who helped invent modern American poetry. She never knew anyone would read her work.
But before them all came Herman Melville.
Born in 1819 in New York City to a merchant family, Melville’s father died when he was 12, leaving the family in debt. He tried various jobs—bank clerk, teacher, farmhand. At 20, he went to sea as a merchant sailor, then at 21 signed onto a whaling expedition bound for the South Pacific. He jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, lived with Indigenous people, and kept sailing. Those experiences became the basis for his writing.
At 27, Melville published Typee in 1846, a South Seas adventure based on his real experiences. It was a bestseller. His follow-up, Omoo, did even better. He married, bought a farm in Massachusetts, and became friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was celebrated, successful, financially secure.
But admit it: Most of us know nothing about Typee or Omoo. What Melville is known for now is what he published in America on November 14, 1851—174 years ago this week: Moby-Dick.
This was the book Melville poured everything into: his sea experience, his philosophical ambitions, his literary innovation.
But, it flopped. Critics called it “absurd” and “repulsive.” Readers who’d loved his earlier adventure tales were baffled by the digressions into whale anatomy and metaphysics. It sold poorly.
His next novel, Pierre, bombed even harder. Publishers stopped wanting his work. The money dried up. By his late 30s, Melville was washed up.
With a wife, four children, mounting debts, and no prospects, Melville took a job as a customs inspector at the New York docks—$4 per day, checking cargo manifests. The man who’d sailed to the South Pacific and written one of the most ambitious novels in American literature spent 19 years as a bureaucrat on the docks.
He kept writing quietly at night—poetry that nobody read, a novella called Billy Budd that he never finished—but mostly, he just worked his civil-service job and went home. He died on September 28, 1891, at 72. His New York Times obituary misspelled his first name as “Henry.” He’d lived 40 years—from his early 30s until his death—in near-total obscurity.
Then something remarkable happened. In the 1920s, decades after his death, scholars rediscovered Melville’s work. Moby-Dick was finally recognized for what it was: one of the greatest novels ever written in English. By the 1950s, it was taught in every American literature class. It has never been out of print since—millions of copies sold.
“Call me Ishmael” is now one of the most famous opening lines in literature.
The book that flopped in 1851 is still in print in 2025, and the customs inspector who died in obscurity is now recognized as one of America’s greatest writers.
Yet, Herman Melville never knew.
We’re collectively getting better at recognizing genius, even if we’re still not perfect. The experimental novel that baffled 1851 readers is now appreciated. The poetry that seemed too strange in 1886 is now celebrated. Each generation learns from the last.
Somewhere right now, a writer works in obscurity, their name unknown—until 2095. Even at the end of your life, the greatest chapter of your story might still be waiting to be written.
7 other things to know this week ...
Sunday, November 9: “As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay.” — Günter Schabowski, German Democratic Republic government spokesman, on this day in 1989, during a confusing press conference in which he announced a massive policy change that would allow East Germans to emigrate to the West. Within hours, thousands gathered at checkpoints demanding to be allowed to cross into West Berlin, and the crowd began to tear down the Berlin Wall.
Monday, November 10: “The moment I had the monitor inside the Bird, my performances became much better. I had room in the puppet to look down on the tiny picture and see what the Bird was doing. I see the same picture the viewer sees, not the world form the Bird’s point of view.” — Carol Spinney, who from Day 1 (which was this day in 1969) until his death in 2019, portrayed Big Bird on the TV show Sesame Street. In his memoir, Spinney talked about how he had a small TV receiver inside the Big Bird suit, because otherwise he couldn’t see outside of it.
Tuesday, November 11: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” — extraordinarily prescient comment by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, general and chief of staff of the French army, upon the signing of the agreement ending World War I this day in 1918.
Wednesday, November 12: “You affect the world by what you browse.” — Tim Berners-Lee, who on this date in 1990 published his formal proposal for the World Wide Web, a system for sharing information across computer networks.
Thursday, November 13: “What I’d do, I figured, I’d go down to the Holland Tunnel and bum a ride, and then I’d bum another one, and another one, and another one, and in a few days I’d be somewhere out West where it was very pretty and sunny and where nobody’d know me and I’d get a job.” — J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. The tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey opened this day in 1927.
Friday, November 14: “If you want to do it, you can do it. The question is, do you want to do it? I always have a comfortable feeling that nothing is impossible if one applies a certain amount of energy in the right direction.” — Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known as Nellie Bly, who on this day in 1889 completed her round-the-world journey from New York City in 72 days, 6 hours -- beating the fictional Phileas Fogg’s 80-day around-the-world record from Jules Verne’s novel.
Saturday, November 15: “Article I. The Stile of this confederacy shall be, ‘The United States of America.’” — Early passage from the Articles of Confederation, approved this day in 1777. Though later replaced by the U.S. Constitution, the Articles represented a crucial step in forming the United States government and establishing the principle that free states could unite for common purpose.
Did I forget anything?
And I think that’s everything for this week ...
Only kidding! I have a lot of U.S. Marine veteran readers, and they might swallow their crayons whole if I didn’t add something important:
The U.S.M.C. traces its founding to November 10, 1775, when the Second Continental Congress established the first and second battalions of the Continental Marines.
Happy 250th Birthday to the U.S. Marine Corps—and a sincere thank you to all those who served!
This was a great Monday morning read, Bill. Having read several Melville short stories in college (Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scribner, among others) as well as Moby Dick, I appreciated his story all the more. While I will certainly agree that he is one of America’s greatest modern writers, I will also say that I found Moby Dick painful in the way Melville goes into the most intricate detail (describing the wooden deck of the ship, for instance). Your article brings back a lot of memories from that American Lit class (all of them good). Your own work is a quiet encouragement to someday sit down and start writing. (If I could just find the time and focus my heart and mind!)
Thanks, too, for the “on this day” entries. I love history. While the memorizing of dates just scratches the historical surface, those dates are useful portals to events, places, and people remind us the world’s story is bigger than just us.
And just plain, old thank you for striving with your online work. I don’t respond nearly as often as I’d like, your daily work is one of the few emails I look forward to seeing and reading every weekday morning. Keep up the great work.
Grace and peace!
I often think that we "have to read" great literature way too early to appreciate it. I read Moby Dick in high school, then, years later I was living for two years in Lisbon, Portugal. The English library there had only the books found on a high school literature list, so I started re-reading things like My Antonia (and all I could get of Willa Cather!)
I am now 80, and have been amazed by re-reading books I thought I knew. War and Peace: Ignore the romance...Tolstoy's view of war is eye-opening: Not great generals win or lose wars. What tilt the balance are the stupid mistakes, and lucky breaks in which some soldier is in the Right (or Wrong) place at the Right or Wrong time!