Moby Dick published -- and trashed

From Today In Literature:

On this day in 1851 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in the United States. The British edition had been published the previous month, with a botched ending; the American edition corrected this, but even if the American reviewers read to the end they sided with the British: "...so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature."

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Melville expressed much of his disappointment at the failure of his masterpiece in his next novel, Pierre, or the Ambiguities with fierce satirizing of publishers and popular taste. In the mid-60s, as I was getting ready to go to graduate school, Pierre was still considered a failure, even as Moby Dick finally had been recognized as a master work. I disagree, believing like a recent critic that Pierre was "surely the finest psychological novel anyone had yet written in English," not a mainstream view in the 60s. This argument -- ground-breaking, I thought, with usual graduate student audacity -- was going to become my Ph.D. thesis. And off I went to the University of Oregon in 1966 to write just this.

My first year in grad school I was shocked to learn that someone had beat me to the punch! A grad student at the University of Michigan had made the same argument in a new Ph.D. thesis, which I found on microfilm. I expressed my frustration to my advisor, threatening to drop out of school, but the dear professor calmed me down, told me this was par for the course, and suggested I look to the Transcendentalists for a thesis because in several years, just as I got my doctorate, experts of this era would be in great demand (he was right!). I thought about it but then my personal life added fuel to the fire, and I dropped out anyway. I'd return a year later as an MFA candidate in fiction.

So the failure of Moby Dick, which fed Melville's biting satire in Pierre, which attracted me to grad school in the first place, all have personal echoes with me. Had the University of Michigan guy not beat me to the punch, would I be a retired Melville scholar today? Hard to say. My life, like many lives, maybe all lives, is full of little accidents like this.