Moby Dick or the Whale

Herman Melville's Moby Dick is perhaps the greatest of all American novels. The story of Captain Ahab's obsession with destroying the white whale that crippled him in a previous encounter.

Book Description: Herman Melville's Moby Dick is perhaps the greatest of all American novels. The story of Captain Ahab's obsession with destroying the white whale that crippled him in a previous encounter, Moby Dick transcends its subject by exploring the bigger picture of man and his precarious and often contradictory relationship with the universe he inhabits, a universe of the greatest good and the most profound evil. It is a timeless epic parable that is by turns amusing and unsettling, but always fascinating.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature: (in full Moby-Dick; or, The Whale) Novel by Herman Melville, published in London in October 1851 and published a month later in the masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels. The basic plot of Moby-Dick is simple. The narrator (who asks to be called "Ishmael") tells of the last voyage of the ship Pequod out of New Bedford, Mass. Captain Ahab is obsessed with the pursuit of the white whale Moby-Dick, which finally kills him. On that level, the work is an intense, superbly authentic narrative. Its theme and central figure, however, are reminiscent of Job in his search for justice and of Oedipus in his search for truth. The novel's richly symbolic language and tragic hero are indicative of Melville's deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges.

From the Back Cover: "Responsive to the shaping forces of his age as only men of passionate imagination are, even Melville can hardly have been fully aware of how symbolical an american hero he had fashioned in Ahab.... He is the embodiment of his author's most profound response to the problem of the free individual will in extremis."

--F.O. Matthiessen

This edition reproduces the illustrations and page design created by Rockwell Kent for Random House in 1930.

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