Moby-Dick

A masterpiece—GuardianA great book…a deep great artist—D.H. LawrenceA wonderful delight—Nathaniel PhilbrickMoby Dick is my favourite novel, bar none. It works on so many levels. It taught me that you can have a top layer of narrative - like the seafaring story - and then below that all those wonderful, rich, symbolic things going on—Clive BarkerTo convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes—London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851What a book [Moby-Dick] Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points—Nathaniel HawthorneOsama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick—Edward Said

Herman Melville was born on 1st August 1819. He embarked on his first sea voyage in 1839 as a cabin boy aboard the St Lawrence, bound for Liverpool. He later worked as a teacher before returning to the sea on the Achushnet. During this voyage, he abandoned ship and spent time living among the natives of the Marquesas Islands. This experience inspired his novels Typee and Omoo, both of which were published to considerable success.

Melville became close friends with the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated Moby-Dick. However, Moby-Dick and his subsequent works and poetry did not achieve significant success during his lifetime. The first printing of 3,000 copies of Moby-Dick did not sell out. It wasn’t until the 1920s that his literary contributions began to be properly appreciated. Today, Moby-Dick is widely regarded as one of the most significant American novels ever written. Melville passed away on 28th September 1891.

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