Moby-Dick

“Call me Ishmael.” With one of the most famous openings in literature, a wandering sailor signs aboard the Nantucket whaler Pequod and is drawn into the obsession of her captain. Ahab has lost a leg to a great white whale named Moby Dick, and he has bent his ship, his crew, and the whole of his remaining life to a single purpose: to hunt that whale across the world’s oceans and destroy it.

What begins as a sailor’s yarn swells into something vast — a tragedy in the key of Shakespeare, a meditation on fate and the unknowable, and an encyclopedia of the whale and the whaling trade. Around Ahab move Starbuck, the grave first mate who sees the madness and cannot stop it; Queequeg, the tattooed harpooneer whose friendship opens the book; and the white whale itself, a symbol that no single meaning can hold.

Drawn partly from the real sinking of the whaleship Essex and from Melville’s own years before the mast, Moby-Dick was a commercial and critical failure in his lifetime. Only in the twentieth century, through the great Melville Revival, was it recognized for what it is: one of the supreme achievements of American literature, and one of the most inexhaustible books ever written.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1851 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and lasting power, a biographical note on Herman Melville, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.