About the author
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet whose early experience at sea fed much of his fiction. Moby-Dick expanded the whaling voyage into an inquiry about labor, knowledge, obsession, nature, and the limits of interpretation.
Between the chase's advances, Melville opens the novel outward: chapters on whale anatomy, on the business of rendering a carcass, on rope and ambergris and the honor of whaling. Far from digressions, these passages build the world Ahab is willing to burn down, and they give the final confrontation its weight.
Where to start
Start with Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab drives his crew across the world's oceans after the white whale that took his leg.
