Early success, a failed masterwork, oblivion, rediscovery. This was the career of Melville. After the failure of Moby Dick, Melville wrote an extraordinary book (I think it's as good) that painfully satirized some of what he must have been feeling, Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Had a grad student in Michigan not beat me to it, I planned to write my PhD thesis on this, showing the academic world what a brilliant book Pierre was -- and then I may never have become a writer. But the Michigan dude got there first, and being first in an unpopular argument is everything, so I had the usual grad student nervous breakdown and dropped out of school. And returned a writer.
Moby-Dick "So Much Trash"
On this day in 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published. The British edition, entitled The Whale, had appeared the previous month, but through a sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, it had a rearranged and incomplete ending. This set off another sequence of error, poor judgment and bad timing, this time involving not the publishers but the critics, who looked upon the botched ending as the last straw in a book already too unusual and obscure. The upshot was that Melville's masterpiece, the book he was counting on to rescue his reputation and his finances, was so belittled and slandered in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it never had a chance.
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clipped from www.todayinliterature.com
clipped from www.todayinliterature.com
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