To whom did Herman Melville dedicate his novel, Moby Dick?
Herman Melville warmer reviews for "Redburn" (1849), a story of life on a merchant ship, and his 1850 description of the harsh life aboard a man-of-war in "White-Jacket", but they did not provide financial security. In August 1850, Melville moved his growing family to Arrowhead, a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he established a profound but short-lived friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated "Moby-Dick". This novel was another commercial failure, published to mixed reviews. Melville's career as a popular author effectively ended with the cool reception of "" (1852), in part a satirical portrait of the literary culture at the
Moby Dick (whale) Moby Dick (whale) Moby Dick is a fictional sperm whale who is the main antagonist in Herman Melville's 1851 novel of the same name. Melville based the fictional whale partially on a real albino whale of that period called Mocha Dick. Ishmael describes Moby Dick as having two prominent white areas around “a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump,” the rest of his body being of stripes and patches between white and gray. The animal's exact dimensions are never given, but the novel claims that the largest sperm whales can reach a length of ninety feet