Moby-Dick

Herman Melville (1819-91) became in his late twenties a highly successful author of exotic novels based on his experiences as a sailor - writing in quick succession <i>Typee</i> <i>Omoo</i> <i>Redburn </i>and <i>White-Jacket</i>. However his masterpiece <i>Moby-Dick</i> was met with incomprehension and the other later works which are now the basis of his reputation such as <i>Bartleby the Scrivener </i>and <i>The Confidence-Man</i> were failures. Melville stopped writing fiction and the rest of his long life was spent first as a lecturer and then for nineteen years as a customs official in New York City. He was also the author of the immensely long poem <i>Clarel </i>which was similarly dismissed. At the end of his life he wrote <i>Billy Budd Sailor</i> which was published posthumously in 1924. <p><b>The Penguin English Library Edition of <i>Moby-Dick </i>by Herman Melville<br></b><br><b>'The frail gunwales bent in collapsed and snapped as both jaws like an enormous shears sliding further aft bit the craft completely in twain...'</b><br><br><i>Moby-Dick</i> is one of the most expansive feats of imagination in the whole of literature: the mad raging Shakespearean tale of Captain Ahab's insane quest to kill a giant white whale that has taken his leg and upon which he has sworn vengeance at any cost. A creation unlike any other this is an epic story of fatal monomania and the deepest dreams and obsessions of mankind.<br><br>The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.</p> <p><b>The Penguin English Library Edition of <i>Moby-Dick </i>by Herman Melville<br></b><br><b>'The frail gunwales bent in collapsed and snapped as both jaws like an enormous shears sliding further aft bit the craft completely in twain...'</b><br><br><i>Moby-Dick</i> is one of the most expansive feats of imagination in the whole of literature: the mad raging Shakespearean tale of Captain Ahab's insane quest to kill a giant white whale that has taken his leg and upon which he has sworn vengeance at any cost. A creation unlike any other this is an epic story of fatal monomania and the deepest dreams and obsessions of mankind.<br><br>The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.</p>