Back in 1851 -- On this date in Publishing History

Posted at Melville dot-org (www.melville.org/hmmoby.htm):
First American edition published November 14, 1851 by Harper & Brothers, New York.
As letters to Richard Henry Dana and Richard Bentley attest, Melville was far along on a new book by May 1850. This latest work was apparently another relatively simple adventure narrative in the manner of Typee or Redburn, "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends of the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer...." That August Evert Duyckinck wrote that the story was "mostly done -- a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery -- something quite new."Melville had promised Bentley that the book would be ready that autumn, in expectation of which he was sent an advance of 150 pounds. His financial situation was poor and he was desperately in need of a publishing success. Nevertheless, he abandoned the nearly-finished romance to spend an entire year rewriting under a spell of intense intellectual ferment further heightened by the study of Shakespeare and a developing friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. The resulting work was finally shipped to Bentley on September 10, 1851: although it received many positive reviews, it sold poorly and accelerated the decline of Melville's literary reputation.The Epilogue, explaining how Ishmael survived the destruction of the Pequod, was inadvertently omitted from Bentley's edition, leading many British critics to condemn Melville for leaving no one alive to tell the first-person narrative