Book description
With an essay by Alfred Kazin.
'The frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both
jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft
completely in twain...'
Moby-Dick 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.
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.
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 Typee, Omoo,
Redburn and White-Jacket. However, his masterpiece
Moby-Dick was met with incomprehension and the other later
works which are now the basis of his reputation, such as Bartleby,
the Scrivener and The Confidence-Man, 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 Clarel, which was similarly dismissed. At the end of
his life he wrote Billy Budd, Sailor, published posthumously in 1924.
The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor are
published together in the Penguin English Library.
