Moby-Dick: or The Whale

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) is a novel by Herman Melville, in which Ishmael narrates the monomaniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on the albino sperm whale Moby Dick, which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg at the knee. A commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, its reputation grew immensely during the twentieth century. According to D.H. Lawrence, it is "one of the strangest and most wonderf...