Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

Written by one of America's greatest authors, Moby-Dick is a work of tremendous power and depth-one of world literature's great poetic epics. In the novel, published in 1851 after sixteen months of writing, Herman Melville recounts the Promethean quest of Captain Ahab, who, having lost a leg in a earlier battle with White Whale, is determined to catch the beast and destroy it. By the time readers meet Ahab, he is a vengeful, crazed, and terror-provoking figure, for Moby Dick has come to represent for him all the evil in the world.

The relentless voyage of Ahab and his crew, a finely etched group of weird and wonderful characters who seem both flesh-and-blood individuals and symbolic of the varying qualities of men, becomes a masterful drama of life at sea. The drama is made more fascinating by Melville's eloquent style-a combination of the journalistic, colloquial, and poetic-and the themes and subjects he pursues-whales and whaling; mean's need for love and comradeship; and the fury of Ahab for the whale.

Through realistic storytelling, symbolic allegory, and allusive and figurative language, Melville achieves in Moby-dicka special intensity that readers will marvel at, and not soon forget.