Herman Melville

A whaling ship scours the seas for a mysterious white whale. Its Captain Ahab is obsessed with hunting the creature down. At last, Ahab himself raises the cry, “There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” Those words bring readers to the gripping climax of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale , one of the greatest American novels.

Melville knew the sea well. As a young man, he sailed on a whaling ship to the South Pacific, determined to “sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.,” His first books, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and Omoo, were successful. Typee is based on Melville’s real experiences with cannibals on an island in the South Pacific. But when Moby-Dick was published in 1851, it sold poorly and received bad reviews. Melville continued to write, publishing several novels and many short stories. But he had to work as a customs inspector in New York City to earn a living.

Moby-Dick is unlike any other novel. It is an exciting adventure tale, the story of Ahab’s quest for the white whale. But it also offers long passages about whales and the whaling industry. On a deeper level, the book explores such themes as the conflicts between man and nature and between good and evil.

The novel’s greatness was not widely recognized until many years after Melville’s death.