Moby-Dick - (Everyman's Library Classics) by Herman Melville (Hardcover)

About the Book

One of the most widely-read and respected books in all American literature, "Moby Dick" is the saga of Captain Ahab and his unrelenting pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale who maimed him during their last encounter. A novel blending high-seas romantic adventure, symbolic allegory, and the conflicting ideals of heroic determination and undying hatred, "Moby Dick" is also revered for its historical accounts of the whaling industry of the 1800s.

Book Synopsis

Moby-Dick is Herman Melville's great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul, featuring the timeless characters Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg, and presented here in a beautiful Everyman's Library hardcover edition.

A giant of American literature, Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, and the local was equally sublime. These qualities are on full display in Moby-Dick, his breathtaking maritime masterpiece of belief, friendship, obsession, and whaling.

Published in the same five-year span as The Scarlet Letter, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick stands alone as the ultimate achievement in that stunning period--and in all of American letters.

With an introduction by Larzer Ziff.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman's Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Review Quotes

"[Herman Melville's] metaphysical might makes a lot of contemporary novels seem like cotton candy."--Molly Young, The New York Times

"Some say this is a book about everything and always one for the times, no matter what they might be.... But perhaps timelessness is the true measure of a great novel." --Paul Daley, The Guardian

About the Author

HERMAN MELVILLE was born in New York City in 1819. When his father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856) and Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories (posthumous, 1924). Melville died in 1891.

LARZER ZIFF is a research professor of English at Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively on American literary culture.