Moby-Dick

Herman Melville died in 1891 convinced Moby-Dick was his great failure — it sold under 4,000 copies in his lifetime and was largely forgotten by the time he passed. Twentieth-century critics dug it back up and put it at the summit of American literature, and the case for that holds up: 'Call me Ishmael' remains the most recognized opening line in American prose, and Ahab's pursuit of the whale is still the country's defining allegory for obsession that eats the man chasing it. The digressions into whale anatomy that used to get the book skipped in high school are, read now, the most radical thing about it — knowledge itself treated as part of the drama.