• Rediscovered Artists

  / 6 Big Names That Time Almost Forgot: Herman Melville
• Studies in Classic American Literature
• Fairhaven

• Evert Augustus Duyckinck
• Nathaniel Hawthorne

  / Leaving Salem and friendship with Melville
• Lemuel Shaw

• Bartleby the Scrivener
• Benito Cereno
• Billy Budd, Foretopman
• The Confidence-Man
• The Encantadas
• Israel Potter
• Mardi
• Moby Dick
• Omoo
• The Piazza
• Pierre
• Redburn
• Typee
• White-Jacket

• Captain Ahab
• John Claggart
• Queequeg
• Starbuck
• Captain Vere

What may be America’s greatest novel was first published in London on October 18, 1851. Its author: Herman Melville. Its title: The Whale . About a month later, that same novel was published in New York. Its title: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale . Today, Britannica calls that novel Moby Dick.

Why these differences? The change from The Whale to Moby-Dick can be traced to a letter written in September 1851. In that letter, Melville’s brother Allan explains to the novel’s publisher in London, Richard Bentley, that

[s]ince sending proofs of my brothers new work by the Asia on the 10th he has determined upon a new title & dedication—Enclosed you have proof of both—It is thought here that the new title will be a better selling title—It is to be hoped that this letter may reach New Burlington Street before it is too late to adopt these new pages.

Moby-Dick is a legitimate title for the book. being the name given to a particular whale who if I may so express myself is the hero of the volume–

Allan’s hopes went unfulfilled: the letter arrived too late, and Bentley published the book as The Whale. But there was still plenty of time for the change to be made to the title of the American edition, and Harper and Brothers duly did so: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale was released in November 1851.

What’s unique about the hyphen in the title Moby-Dick is that it represents one of only three times in the first American edition that the whale’s name is hyphenated. All other references to the hero of this volume? Moby Dick.

Mary Norris, a copy editor at The New Yorker who investigates this hyphen in her book Between You & Me , discovered this discrepancy by way of a note by G. Thomas Tanselle in a Library of America edition of Melville’s novel. In that note, Tanselle also provides his own explanation of the hyphen by way of the editors of an edition on which the Library of America one is based:

The Northwestern-Newberry editors retain the hyphen in the title, arguing that hyphenated titles were conventional in mid-nineteenth-century America. As a result, the hyphenated form refers to the book, the unhyphenated to the whale.

Norris’s takeaway? “It was a copy editor who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick,” she concludes.

The ambiguity surrounding the origins of that hyphen underscores why Britannica uses Moby Dick as the book’s title. Though Allan Melville attributes the title Moby-Dick to his brother, it remains unknown whether Herman intended Moby-Dick or Moby Dick. The latter, after all, is the form that matches nearly every other reference to the whale that appears in the earliest editions that can be connected to Melville himself. It is believed that Herman wrote a letter to Bentley dated September 5, 1851, that Bentley received 20 days later, but— according to a 1993 volume of Melville’s correspondence, at least —that letter, which might more clearly answer the question of Melville’s intent, is lost. Should, then, the weight of this hyphen rest on the man who wrote that “...the book. being the name...” and, later in that same letter, wrote of “the next steamber” carrying proofs to England? And if that unfairly impugns Allan at a moment when he was perhaps simply writing too hastily, should we today feel obligated to retain a style that may have been conventional in the 19th century but is not in the 21st?

Britannica refers to Melville’s novel as Moby Dick for the same reason it uses Twelfth Night to refer to the play that Shakespeare’s First Folio titled Twelfe Night, Or what you will or Germany to refer to the country that its German-speaking residents call Deutschland. These terms are conventional English-language renderings intended to convey information in a straightforward manner that avoids pedantry where pedantry has no benefit.

Novels

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846); Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847); Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), a political and philosophical allegory; Redburn, His First Voyage (1849); White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850); Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851, as Moby Dick; or, The White Whale in some later 19th-century editions); Pierre; or The Ambiguities (1852); Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, (1855), a historical novel of the American Revolution; The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), a satirical allegory; Billy Budd, Foretopman, a short novel written 1888–91 and found after Melville’s death; first published in Billy Budd, and Other Prose Pieces (1924).

Other stories, sketches, and journals

The Piazza Tales (1856), includes “The Piazza,” “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Encantadas, or, Enchanted Isles,” and “The Lightning-Rod Man”; The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches (1922), contains 10 sketches first published in periodicals, 1850–56; Journal up the Straits, October 1, 1856–May 5, 1857 (1935); Journal of Melville’s Voyage in the Clipper Ship, “Meteor” (1929).

Verse

Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866); Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876); John Marr, and Other Sailors; With Some Sea-Pieces (1888); Timoleon (1891), a collection. Poems unpublished during Melville’s lifetime are included in later collections and selections.