information:extraction
American

Some sixty reviews appeared in America, the criterion for counting as a review being more than two lines of comment. Only a couple of reviewers expressed themselves early enough not to be influenced by news of the British reception. Though Moby-Dick did contain the Epilogue and so accounted for Ishmael's survival, the British reviews influenced the American reception. The earliest American review, in the Boston Post for November 20, quoted the London Athenaeum ' s scornful review, not realizing that some of the criticism of The Whale did not pertain to Moby-Dick. This last point, and the authority and influence of British criticism in American reviewing, is clear from the review's opening: "We have read nearly one half of this book, and are satisfied that the London Athenaeum is right in calling it 'an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact'". Though the Post quoted the greater portion of the review, it omitted the condensed extract of Melville's prose the Athenaeum had included to give readers an example of it. The Post deemed the price of one dollar and fifty cents far too much: "'The Whale' is not worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper".

The New York North American Miscellany for December summarized the verdict in the Athenaeum. The reviewer of the December New York Eclectic Magazine had actually read Moby-Dick in full, and was puzzled why the Athenaeum was so scornful of the ending. The attack on The Whale by the Spectator was reprinted in the December New York International Magazine, which inaugurated the influence of another unfavorable review. Rounding off what American readers were told about the British reception, in January Harper's Monthly Magazine attempted some damage control, and wrote that the book had "excited a general interest" among the London magazines.

The most influential American review, ranked according to the number of references to it, appeared in the weekly magazine Literary World, which had printed Melville's "Mosses" essay the preceding year. The author of the unsigned review in two installments, on November 15 and 22, was later identified as publisher Evert Duyckinck. The first half of the first installment was devoted to an event of remarkable coincidence: early in the month, between the publishing of the British and the American edition, a whale had sunk the New Bedford whaler Ann Alexander near Chile.

In the second installment, Duyckinck described Moby-Dick as three books rolled into one: he was pleased with the book as far as it was a thorough account of the sperm whale, less so with it as far as the adventures of the Pequod crew were considered, perceiving the characters as unrealistic and expressing inappropriate opinions on religions, and condemned the essayistic rhapsodizing and moralizing with what he thought was little respect of what "must be to the world the most sacred associations of life violated and defaced." The review prompted Hawthorne to take the "unusually aggressive step of reproving Duyckinck" by criticizing the review in a letter to Duyckinck of December 1:

What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points.

The Transcendental socialist George Ripley published a review in the New York Tribune for November 22, in which he compared the book favorably to Mardi, because the "occasional touches of the subtle mysticism" was not carried on to excess but kept within boundaries by the solid realism of the whaling context. Ripley was almost surely also the author of the review in Harper's for December, which saw in Ahab's quest the "slight framework" for something else: "Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life." Among the handful of other favorable reviews was one in the Albion on November 22 which saw the book as a blend of truth and satire.

Melville's friend Nathaniel Parker Willis, reviewing the book in November 29 Home Journal, found it "a very racy, spirited, curious and entertaining book... it enlists the curiosity, excites the sympathies, and often charms the fancy". In December 6 Spirit of the Times, editor William T. Porter praised the book, and all of Melville's five earlier works, as the writings "of a man who is at once philosopher, painter, and poet". Some other, shorter reviews mixed their praise with genuine reservations about the "irreverence and profane jesting", as the New Haven Daily Palladium for November 17 phrased it. Many reviewers, Parker observes, had come to the conclusion that Melville was capable of producing enjoyable romances, but they could not see in him the author of great literature.

Reviewers who actually did read the book "found much to praise," Robertson-Lorant writes, but conservative reviewers did not like it. A friend of Duyckinck's, William Allen Butler, protested in the National Intelligencer against "the querulous and cavilling innuendoes" and the "irreverent wit," while the Boston Post called it "a crazy sort of affair."