Within a year after Melville's death in 1891, Moby-Dick, along with Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, was reprinted by Harper & Brothers, giving it a chance to be rediscovered. However, only New York's literary underground showed interest, just enough to keep Melville's name circulating for the next 25 years in the capital of American publishing. During this time, a few critics were willing to devote time, space, and a modicum of praise to Melville and his works, or at least those that could still be easily obtained or remembered. Other works, especially the poetry, went largely forgotten.[174]
In 1917, American author Carl Van Doren became the first of this period to proselytize about Melville's value in his 1921 study, The American Novel, calling Moby-Dick a pinnacle of American Romanticism.[174]
In his 1923 Studies in Classic American Literature, novelist, poet, and short story writer D. H. Lawrence celebrated the originality and value of American authors, among them Melville. Lawrence saw Moby-Dick as a work of the first order despite his using the expurgated original English edition, which lacked the epilogue.[174]
The Modern Library brought out Moby-Dick in 1926, and the Lakeside Press in Chicago commissioned Rockwell Kent to design and illustrate a striking three-volume edition, which appeared in 1930. Random House then issued a one-volume trade version of Kent's edition, which in 1943 they reprinted as a less expensive Modern Library Giant.[175]
The novel has been adapted or represented in art, film, books, cartoons, television, and more than a dozen versions in comic-book format. The first adaptation was the 1926 silent movie The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymore,[176] in which Ahab returns to marry his fiancée after killing the whale.[177] The most famous adaptation was the John Huston 1956 film produced from a screenplay by author Ray Bradbury.[178] The long list of adaptations, as Bryant and Springer put it, demonstrates that "the iconic image of an angry embittered American slaying a mythic beast seemed to capture the popular imagination." They conclude that "different readers in different periods of popular culture have rewritten Moby-Dick" to make it a "true cultural icon".[177] American artist David Klamen has cited the novel as an important influence on his dark, slow-to-disclose paintings, noting a passage in the book in which a mysterious, undecipherable painting in a bar is gradually revealed to depict a whale.[179]
American author Ralph Ellison wrote a tribute to the book in the prologue of his 1952 novel Invisible Man. The narrator remembers a moment of truth under the influence of marijuana and evokes a church service: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness.' And the congregation answers: 'That blackness is most black, brother, most black ... '" This scene, Ellison biographer Arnold Rampersad observes, "reprises a moment in the second chapter of Moby-Dick", where Ishmael wanders around New Bedford looking for a place to spend the night, and momentarily joins a congregation: "It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there." According to Rampersad, it was Melville who "empowered Ellison to insist on a place in the American literary tradition" by his example of "representing the complexity of race and racism so acutely and generously in his text".[180] Rampersad also believes Ellison's choice of a first-person narrator was inspired above all by Moby-Dick, and the novel even has a similar opening sentence with the narrator introducing himself ("I am an invisible man").[181] The oration by Ellison's blind preacher Barbee resembles Father Mapple's sermon in that both prepare the reader for what is to come.[182]
According to critic Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae, a book with the whiteness or blankness of nonmeaning as its main symbol should logically propose a depersonalized view of nature, but in this respect the novel is "amazingly inconsistent", as Melville "elevates the masculine principle above the feminine."[183] To be perfectly consistent, in her view the whale should be "sexually neuter," and its whiteness "an obliteration of person, gender, and meaning."[184]
American songwriter Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of 2017 cited Moby-Dick as one of the three books that influenced him most. Dylan's description ends with an acknowledgment: "That theme, and all that it implies, would work its way into more than a few of my songs."[185]
