American · 1819–1891
Herman Melville published "Moby-Dick" in 1851 to commercial failure and critical indifference. The American author spent his remaining decades in obscurity, working as a customs inspector. Only in the twentieth century did scholars recognize his whale hunt as perhaps the greatest American novel—a work of philosophical ambition, narrative innovation, and encyclopedic range that anticipates modernism. Melville proved that recognition can arrive posthumously.