Moby Dick

Herman Melville's vast, oceanic masterpiece of obsession and the whale. Captain Ahab's pursuit of the white whale becomes a meditation on fate, nature, and the human will.

At a glance One of the great American novels, unlike anything else. Call it the great American novel and you would not be alone, but that phrase hardly… Melville's book is an ocean in itself, and you do not so much read it as sail into it. What it's about A young man who asks us to call him Ishmael signs aboard the whaling…

A young man who asks us to call him Ishmael signs aboard the whaling ship Pequod and comes under the command of Captain Ahab, a man consumed by his hunt for the white whale that once maimed him.