Herman Melville

moby-dick

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more

source_10558

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our <a href="/company/about-us/notices/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a>

Keep an eye out for a confirmation in your inbox

Stories, ideas and giveaways to help you spark young imaginations

source_10972

The latest books, activities and tips to help you grow little readers

source_10975

About us

About Us (Header 4)

john-le-carre-a-legacy-of-spies-960-2.jpg

Margaret Atwood

Richard Osman

Malorie Blackman

George Orwell

marian_keyes_mobile_320x200px.png

Elif Shafak

shonfaye

Authors (Header 3)

Books (Header 2)

Company

Features (Header 1)

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Abridged Edition

Penguin Readers Level 7: Moby Dick (ELT Graded Reader)

Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories

The Maldive Shark

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-clothbound-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Banner&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Clothbound_Series_26_06" target="_blank">Buy 3 classics for £33 on the Penguin Shop</a>

or, The Whale

Moby-Dick

The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-penguin-english-library/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_English_Library_Series_26_06">Choose 5 classics for £25 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Or, The Whale

Redburn

The Confidence-man

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Complete Shorter Fiction

Moby Dick is my favourite novel, bar none. It works on so many levels. It taught me that you can have a top layer of narrative - like the seafaring story - and then below that all those wonderful, rich, symbolic things going on

To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes

London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851

What a book [Moby-Dick] Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the Literary World, did justice to its best points

Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick

'The ultimate fish story' Bob Dylan 
 
 When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, and will stop at nothing on his quest to annihilate his nemesis.

'I love Melville' Donna Tartt 
 
'The ultimate fish story' Bob Dylan

Herman Melville was born in New York on 1 August 1819. He first went to sea at the age of nineteen on the St Lawrence which sailed from New York to Liverpool. He later worked as a teacher before taking to the seas again in 1841 on the whaleship Achushnet. After six months of sailing in the Pacific, Melville abandoned ship and lived among the natives of the Marquesas Islands for several weeks. This experience inspired his first book Typee (1846) which was published to great success. The sequel, Omoo, was published in 1847 and later that year Melville married Elizabeth Shaw. He published several other novels and poems, including his most famous work, Moby-Dick (1851), but his later works were not widely appreciated until long after his death. Moby-Dick is now considered one of the most important American novels of all time. Melville died on 28 September 1891.

Moby-Dick

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

Reviews

About the author

Herman Melville

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter