Publication of Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is a novel by the American writer Herman Melville, which first appeared in London in October 1851 under the title The Whale, and in the United States the following month with its present title. It tells of the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod under the obsessive Captain Ahab, who seeks revenge on the white whale that took his leg, as narrated by the sailor Ishmael. Melville drew on his own experience of whaling in the Pacific in the early 1840s. The novel combines adventure with chapters on whales, philosophy and symbolism, and he dedicated it to Nathaniel Hawthorne. It sold poorly and was largely forgotten by the time of Melville's death, but in the 1920s critics rediscovered it and it came to be ranked among the greatest American novels.

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