Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was first published in London on October 18, 1851, under the title The Whale. The American edition followed a month later. The book was not a success. It failed. It sold a few thousand copies in Melville's lifetime and made him almost nothing, and by the time he died, in 1891, it was out of print and he was remembered, if at all, for the travel books he had written earlier.
The novel is the story of Captain Ahab, who lost his leg to a white sperm whale and sets out to find the animal and kill it, and the whole thing is told by a sailor named Ishmael, in a voice that swings between plain account and long essay. The chapters digress into the anatomy of whales and the history of the hunt, and the reader is pulled through them by the force of Ahab's obsession, which is the real subject of the book. It is not a sea story so much as a study of a man who will not stop.
Melville drew it from his own life. He had been at sea. He had shipped out on a whaler as a young man, jumped ship in the Pacific, and lived among the people of the Marquesas, and the books he wrote from those years had made him famous for a time. Moby-Dick was meant to be his masterwork, and the critics of 1851 did not know what to make of it, and the public did not buy it, and Melville turned to poetry and then to a job in the customs house.
The recovery came decades later. In the 1920s the book was reprinted and re-read, and the generation that followed took it up as a neglected classic, and it has been taught and argued over ever since. The opening line, call me Ishmael, is among the most quoted in the language, and the white whale has become the word for the thing a person chases past reason.