Moby Dick (1956 film) actor Walter Huston as Ahab, but he had died in 1950. Peck went on to play the role of Father Mapple in the 1998 television miniseries adaptation of Melville's novel, with Patrick Stewart as Ahab. Welles later used the salary from his cameo to fund his own stage production of "Moby Dick", in which Rod Steiger played Captain Ahab. Gregory Peck, comparing his performances in this film and the 1998 "Moby Dick" miniseries, said he liked the miniseries better because it was more faithful to the novel. During a meeting to discuss the screenplay, Ray Bradbury informed John Huston that
Moby-Dick mention of the composition of what became "Moby-Dick" is the final paragraph of the letter Melville wrote to Richard Henry Dana, Jr. on May 1, 1850: Some scholars have concluded that Melville composed "Moby-Dick" in two or even three stages. Reasoning from a series of inconsistencies and structural developments in the final version, they hypothesize that the work he mentioned to Dana was, in the words of Lawrence Buell, a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure, but that reading Shakespeare and his encounters with Hawthorne inspired him to rewrite it as "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions". Bezanson objects that the letter