Herman Melville had gone to sea as a young man, and in 1841, at twenty-one, he sailed from Massachusetts on a whaling ship, the Acushnet. A year and a half later he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, lived for a few weeks among the people of the Taipi valley, and drifted around the Pacific for two more years before coming home. His first books, Typee and Omoo, were adventure stories drawn from those years, and they made him popular.

Moby-Dick was something else entirely. He began it in 1850 as another sea adventure, drawing on his own whaling voyage and on true stories, including that of the Essex, a Nantucket whaleship sunk by an enraged sperm whale in 1820. But that summer, at a picnic in the Berkshire hills, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the friendship and Hawthorne’s dark, serious fiction seem to have pushed him to make the book bigger and stranger. He wrote it at his farmhouse, Arrowhead, near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where from his desk he could see the snowy hump of Mount Greylock, which looked to him like a whale.

The book that emerged is a whaling adventure, a tragedy about Captain Ahab’s mad hunt for the white whale that took his leg, an encyclopedia of whales and whaling, a set of sermons and stage scenes, and a long meditation on what we can and cannot know. It opens with three of the most famous words in American literature: “Call me Ishmael.”

It came out first in London, in October 1851, as The Whale, in three volumes with many changes and, by mistake, without its epilogue, so that some British reviewers complained that the narrator seemed to drown with everyone else. The American edition, as Moby-Dick, followed on November 14. It was dedicated to Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius.”

Reviews were mixed and sales were poor, and Melville’s later books did worse. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks. When he died in 1891, he was nearly forgotten. Around the hundredth anniversary of his birth, in 1919, critics and readers began to rediscover him, and Moby-Dick rose to its place as perhaps the great American novel.