Moby Dick

Author: Herman Melville

Stock information

General Fields

  • : 21.00 NZD
  • : 9780141198958
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • :
  • : 0.48988
  • : May 2012
  • : 198mm X 129mm X 31mm
  • :
  • : 12.99
  • : June 2012
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  • :
  • : books

Special Fields

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  • :
  • : Herman Melville
  • : The\Penguin English Library
  • : Paperback
  • :
  • :
  • : English
  • : 813.36
  • : near fine
  • :
  • : 720
  • :
  • : Illustrations
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Barcode 9780141198958
9780141198958

Description

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read First published in 1851, Herman Melville's masterpiece is, in Elizabeth Hardwick's words, "the greatest novel in American literature." The saga of Captain Ahab and his monomaniacal pursuit of the white whale remains a peerless adventure story but one full of mythic grandeur, poetic majesty, and symbolic power. Filtered through the consciousness of the novel's narrator, Ishmael, Moby-Dick draws us into a universe full of fascinating characters and stories, from the noble cannibal Queequeg to the natural history of whales, while reaching existential depths that excite debate and contemplation to this day.

Author description

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.