“Drink Ye Harpooners! Death to Moby Dick!”

With that fateful cry, Captain Ahab drags his crew to fulfill his insane obsession: the destruction of the great White Whale known as Moby Dick.

To Captain Ahab, the creature that took his leg is not just a whale; it is the embodiment of pure evil.

Brimming with powerful imagery and symbolism, its intensity sustained by roguish irony and moments of exquisite beauty, Melville's masterpiece is both a great American epic and one of the most profoundly imaginative creations in literary history. It has thrilled readers for over one hundred years.

“Certainly it is hard to find a more wonderful book than Moby Dick, and it ought to be read by this generation, amid whose feeble mental food, furnished by the small realists and fantasts of the day, it would appear as Hercules among the pygmies, or as Moby Dick himself among a school of minnows.”
 —SPRINGFIELD MASSACHUSETTS REPUBLICAN

* Contains extended historical context and a critical essay: Herman Melville: Living Life in Reverse. A Cultural and Historical Perspective of the author’s life, by Emily Whitson Barzumi

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, sailor, and customs inspector. The author of numerous classic novels, essays, and short stories, he is perhaps best known for Moby Dick, Typee, The Confidence Man, Redburn, Clarel, Bartleby, the Scrivener, and Billy Budd. He is considered a literary colossus, and a central figure in the development of the modern novel.