“Moby-Dick” was published in 1851, but The New York Times didn’t review it. In fact, The Times didn’t mention Herman Melville until 1861 — in a review of somebody else’s book, “Adventures in the South Pacific.” “The author has borrowed bodily, without giving credit therefor, from Melville’s ‘Moby Dick,’” the paper complained, while conceding it was a theft the publisher, “the Harpers, may have sanctioned, as they hold the copyright of both books.”
July 10, 1876
In 1876, The Times reviewed Melville’s work for the first time — a two-volume, 600-page poem about the Holy Land, “Clarel,” declaring tartly: “It should have been written in prose. … Verse is certainly not the author’s forte.”
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