Moby-Dick

Description

On board the whaling ship Pequod a crew of wise men and fools, renegades and seeming phantoms is hurled through treacherous seas by crazed Captain Ahab, a man hell-bent on hunting down the mythic White Whale. Melville transforms the little world of the whale ship into a crucible where mankind's fears, faith and frailties are pitted against a relentless fate. Teeming with ideas and imagery, and with its extraordinary intensity sustained by mischievous irony and moments of exquisite beauty, Moby-Dick is both a great American epic and a profoundly imaginative literary creation. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition features an afterword by Nigel Cliff. Designed to appeal to the booklover, Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound hardback gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York. He worked at various jobs, including shipping on the whaler Achshnet and a stint in the US Navy before settling in Massachusetts and starting to write. His first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were fictionalised accounts of his travels and were his most popular works during his lifetime. After marrying in 1847, Melville wrote a series of populist novels for money. With Moby-Dick (1851) he changed course - partly under the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne - but the novel's complexity lost him readers. After publishing two more novels Melville took a job as a customs inspector in New York City harbour and turned to writing poetry. He died in 1891. An unfinished novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, was published in 1924.

Moby-Dick is, for me, the supreme American novel, the source and the inspiration of everything that follows in the American literary canon -- Robert McCrum, 'The 100 best novels' * Guardian * Melville has himself become part of the literary canon. A fixture. -- Ian McGuire * Independent * Much of the impact of Melville's book on any fierce new convert is implicit in that sense of time travel. Sometimes I read it and I feel like I'm going backward, fast. It reads like something that was written before books were invented, yet it is utterly modern -- Philip Hoare * The New Yorker *