Hardly anyone today would think to doubt Melville's right to take a place on the American literary Olympus. His name is on a par with the names of Poe, Whitman and Twain. Several dozen monographs have been written about him, and the number of articles has exceeded a thousand. "Moby Dick" is recognized as the most significant American novel of the 19th century. Meanwhile, contemporaries ranked Melville among the third-rate authors. For them, he was, according to the writer himself, "Melville of the Marquesas Islands," "a man who lived with cannibals." Melville's fame among his contemporaries was brief. His first two novels (Taipi and Omu) were received by the reading public with enthusiasm, but by the mid-1850s they had already forgotten about him, and if they remembered him, then as a writer who "either went crazy, or lost his way." The consequences of prolonged oblivion still affect. Despite the noisy fame and immense popularity that Melville's works gained in America of the 20th century, a critical scientific publication of his works has not yet been carried out.