I love Moby Dick, but I suspect its sardonic humor and trenchant social commentary is not as obvious to straight folk, being as heavily coded it is in the "polite language" of the time. No one tell the conservatives about the subtext, they'd ban it on principle. Perhaps we should stick to a narrative of "it's a book about the once thriving whaling industry, unfairly canceled by woke environmentalists in 1971...."
Also, holy crap, if Huck Finn has too many race issues, Moby Dick is a positive dumpster fire of racist and bigoted language; sympathetic though Melville is to his fellow persecuted citizens, it is a work of satire and freely employs the racist language of the time to make its point. I think the secondary main character, the South Pacfic Islander Queequeeg, is called a heathen more often than he is called by his rightful name.
Interesting fact: it actually wasn't a pay-by-the-word serial, though that was a pretty common phenomenon at the time. The book was more like a personal obsession of Herman Melville's, a semi-autobiographical work that he banged out in less than two years and published as a three-volume set. It was an utter failure commercially, and was only revived after the hubbub surrounding the centennial of Melville's death brought it to scholarly attention. It had been quietly passed down as a "cult classic" within the equivalent of the queer community up to that point, and when William Faulkner, himself a celebrity author by that point and "well acquainted" with the gay community, remarked that it was his favorite novel, quite a buzz grew around it well after its initial publication.
Melville's main claim to fame during his lifetime was the book Omoo, which today is obscure as all hell. Funny how things go.