Moby-Dick

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.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an afterword by Nigel Cliff.

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. Herman 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.

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

Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York City. Both his grandfathers were Revolutionary War heroes but his father, a merchant, died bankrupt in 1833. Melville left school and worked at various jobs before shipping on the whaler Achshnet in 1841. The next year he deserted, travelled the South Seas and joined the US Navy. After three years he retired, settled in Massachusetts and started to write. His first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were fictionalized accounts of his travels: they remained his most popular works during his lifetime. In 1847 Melville married and wrote a series of novels he considered potboilers for money. With Moby-Dick (1851) he changed course, partly under the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne; but the novel's extravagant intensity lost him readers. Pierre (1852) fared no better, and after publishing one more novel Melville took a job as a customs inspector in the New York City harbour and turned to writing poetry. He died there in 1891; an unfinished novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, was published in 1924.