Herman Melville

Melville sailed on a whaler at twenty-one and deserted in the Marquesas; the books he made from it sold well. "Moby-Dick", published in 1851, did not: it sold about 3,200 copies in his lifetime and was widely thought a failure.

He spent his last nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poetry nobody read. His obituary called him "long forgotten". His reputation was rebuilt in the 1920s, thirty years after he was buried under a stone carved with a blank scroll.