Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is an 1851 novel by Herman Melville, first published in London as The Whale and shortly afterwards in New York under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Melville had worked as a common sailor between 1841 and 1844, including on whaling ships, and began writing the book in February 1850, finishing about eighteen months later. The story draws on a notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale and on the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820, which shapes the ending.

The narrator is Ishmael, a young American who, after some time in the merchant navy, decides to sign on a whaler. In Nantucket he joins the Pequod, whose captain, Ahab, lost a leg to the great white whale Moby Dick and has turned its pursuit into an obsession. Ishmael forms a close friendship with the Polynesian harpooneer Queequeg, and the crew, drawn from many nations and backgrounds, follows Ahab across the oceans as the hunt grows ever more dangerous and the captain's authority more unyielding. The story ends in catastrophe, with an epigraph from the Book of Job.

The novel is, to a large extent, an encyclopedia of whaling. Melville interleaves chapters on cetology, descriptions of rendering oil and of the sperm whale's anatomy, accounts of encounters with other ships, and reflections that mix sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, poetry and lists. Ishmael ponders his own choices and the nature of evil, God and fate, so that the chase plot coexists with a philosophical inquiry into obsession and power.

Its early reception was uneven: British reviews were largely favourable, while American ones were more hostile, and the book was a commercial failure and out of print when Melville died in 1891. Its reputation changed in the twentieth century, especially after the centenary of the author's birth in 1919, until it became one of the great American novels. Its opening line, "Call me Ishmael", is among the most quoted in English-language literature.