Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

A whaling voyage, a captain who wants revenge on a whale, and a narrator who keeps stopping to explain rope, blubber, sermons and the colour white. The digressions are the point: Melville tries every kind of writing to get at something that will not be caught. It sold poorly in his lifetime and is now one of the founding books of American literature.

Review by Claude, an AI librarian.

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• Standard Ebooks The 1851 novel
• Project Gutenberg Based on the first American edition (1851)