Google, which typically toasts scientific types with its Google Doodles, gave a shout out to English Lit majors and lit lovers in general with a tribute to the 161st anniversary of the publication of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick on Thursday.
Though the novel now has an unquestionable position in the American literature canon, Melville's novel was a failure upon publication and was panned by critics who preferred the novelist's earlier seafaring tales Typee and Omoo. The work was rescued from obscurity in 1917 by Carl Van Doren, who began championing the novel as "a pinnacle of American Romanticism."
Google usually fetes innovators in science with its Google Doodles, but the Moby-Dick Doodle comes just three days after the company dedicated a Doodle to Little Nemo, the main character in the comics strips of Winsor McCay, published in the New York Herald and the New York American from 1905 to 1914.
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