Moby-Dick Is Published in America

The novel had come out in London a month earlier as The Whale, in three volumes and without the epilogue, which led some British critics to ask how the narrator survived.

Sales were poor, and Melville was largely forgotten when he died in 1891. Critics rediscovered the book in the 1920s, and its opening line, "Call me Ishmael", is now one of the most famous in literature.