Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville, centering on the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the novel was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of Melville's death in 1891, its reputation as a Great American Novel established only in the twentieth century after the 1919 centennial of his birth; its opening sentence, Call me Ishmael, is among world literature's most famous. Melville began writing the novel in February 1850 and finished eighteen months later, drawing on his own experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844 and on wide reading in whaling literature, modeling the white whale on the notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick and basing the book's ending on the 1820 sinking of the whaleship Essex.