Author: hermanmelville

Moby-Dick is one of the great epics in all of literature. Captain Ahab’s hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael’s meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature, and on the grimy physical details of the extraction of oil provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong idolatrous quest. Sometimes read as a terrifying study of … of monomania or as a critical inquiry into the effects of reducing life to symbols, Moby-Dick also offers colorful and often comic glimpses of life aboard a whaling ship.For the first time, the authoritative…

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is a novel by Herman Melville. It is widely considered an outstanding work of Romanticism and the American Renaissance. Ishmael narrates the monomaniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab’s ship and severed his leg at the knee. Although the novel was a commercial failure … and out of print at the time of the author’s death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel grew during the twentieth century.more