History for the day: 1851: Moby-Dick published

History.com has this for 14 November:

On 14 November 1851, Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville about the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod, was published by Harper & Brothers in New York City. Moby-Dick is now considered a great classic of American literature and contains one of the most famous opening lines in fiction: Call me Ishmael. Initially, though, the book about Captain Ahab and his quest for a giant white whale was a flop.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 and, as a young man, spent time in the merchant marines, the Navy, and on a whaling ship in the South Seas. In 1846, he published his first novel, Typee, a romantic adventure based on his experiences in Polynesia. The book was a success and a sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847. Three more novels followed, with mixed critical and commercial results. Melville’s sixth book, Moby-Dick, was first published in October of 1851 in London, England in three volumes titled The Whale, and then in the US a month later. Melville had promised his publisher an adventure story similar to his popular earlier works, but instead, Moby-Dick was a tragic epic, influenced in part by Melville’s friend and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels included The Scarlet Letter.
After Moby-Dick‘s disappointing reception, Melville continued to produce novels, short stories (Bartleby) and poetry, but writing wasn’t paying the bills so, in 1865 he returned to New York City to work as a customs inspector, a job he held for twenty years.
Melville died in 1891, largely forgotten by the literary world. By the 1920s, scholars had rediscovered his work, particularly Moby-Dick, which would eventually become a staple of high school reading lists across the United States. Billy Budd, Melville’s final novel, was published in 1924, 33 years after his death.