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Moby Dick
Book

Moby Dick

London, 1851

Literary Classic

  • Novel
  • Romanticism

What It’s About

Stories of ill-fated ships and their legendary captains have long pervaded human culture, both high-brow and popular: Think Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, or the Disney concoctions The Black Pearl and Captain Sparrow. But arguably none are more iconic than the Pequod and its Captain Ahab, the grimly obsessed whaleman chasing his white whale. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is many things – a portable whaling museum, a pitting of man against nature, and a symbolically rich tale by a literary master. Moreover, readers can understand the Pequod as Melville’s America in microcosm, a political and cultural conceit that offers continued relevance today. The legacy of this great American novel is enduring and vast, including the long-lived symbolism of the white whale and even the ubiquitous coffee chain Starbucks, named after Ahab’s first mate.

Summary

“Call me Ishmael”

Ishmael is a penniless Manhattanite who answers the ocean’s strong call and seeks out his first whaling voyage. After missing his connection to Nantucket to join a whaling ship there, he idles in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for the weekend. His search for cheap lodgings in the dreariest part of town brings him to The Spouter Inn. Within, in the jaws of a whale-shaped bar, appears the old bartender, aptly named Jonah.

Strange Bedfellows

The inn is full, but Ishmael avoids returning to the bitter cold by agreeing to share a bed with aloof, brawny harpooner Queequeg. Ishmael is terrified of his comprehensively tattooed roommate who stays out late selling an embalmed human head. After spending the night fearing that Queequeg, a cannibal, will kill him, Ishmael wakes the next morning embraced in the hug of the slumbering harpooner.

Ishmael keeps sailing tradition by attending the Whaleman’s Chapel before his voyage. Sailor-turned-chaplain Father Mapple delivers a seafarer’s sermon about Jonah’s disobedience toward God, the man’s punishment and repentance within the great whale, and, finally...

About the Author

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. His family was descended from Revolutionary War officers and participants in the Boston Tea Party. Melville eventually joined the merchant marines, the US Navy and a South Seas whaling ship, occupations that would give shape to his first novel, the romantic adventure Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, published in 1846. The debut was successful, and Melville published Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas the following year. Also in 1847, after a short courtship, Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw, daughter of Massachusetts’ chief justice. Melville had four children with Shaw. After publishing three more novels – Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, Redburn: His First Voyage, and White-Jacket – to tepid critical response, Melville published Moby Dick. The tragic epic was a commercial flop, and by 1865, Melville had given up trying to earn a living through his writing, though he continued to write poetry until 1876. Starting in 1866, Melville served as a customs inspector in New York for 20 years. His books were out of print by 1867. That year, his son Malcolm accidentally shot himself and died. Compounding the tragedy, Melville’s second son Stanwix died in a hospital in 1886 after a prolonged illness. These events contributed to Melville’s depression, which lasted many years. On September 28, 1891, while completing the new novel Billy Budd, Sailor, the 72-year-old Melville died of a heart attack. Literary scholars revived his work – including his late-life poetry and books – starting in the late 1910s, and today, Melville’s Moby Dick continues its reign as a great American novel.


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