Moby-Dick

'Call me Ishmael.' A young man with no money goes to sea on a whaling ship from Nantucket, together with Queequeg, a tattooed harpooner from the South Seas who becomes his closest friend. Their captain, Ahab, has lost a leg to Moby Dick, a giant white sperm whale, and he has not sailed for oil but for revenge; he nails a gold coin to the mast for the first man who sights the whale. Between the storms, the hunts and the meetings with other ships, Ishmael pauses to tell everything about whales and whaling, until the three-day chase in the Pacific.

Herman Melville published the novel in 1851 and dedicated it to Nathaniel Hawthorne. It sold poorly and was almost forgotten until the 1920s, when readers rediscovered it as a great American epic. It was inspired partly by the true story of the whaleship Essex, sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. Melville's first, lighter sea book is Typee.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York to a family ruined when he was a boy. At twenty he went to sea, sailed on a whaler to the Pacific, deserted in the Marquesas Islands and turned the adventure into Typee, a bestseller that made him famous at twenty-seven.

His ambitions grew with each book, and Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was misunderstood and sold poorly. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poems and the stories Bartleby, the Scrivener and Billy Budd, and died almost forgotten; he was rediscovered as a great writer in the 1920s.