Moby Dick

Description

Moby Dick by Herman Melville was first published in 1851. Starting with the famous line 'Call me Ishmael', Moby Dick is one of the great American novels. The story follows Ishmael who signs up to go on a whaling ship to escape his life on shore. Only well into the voyage does he finally meet the Captain of the ship, Ahab, and he begins to realise the depth of Ahab's obsessive need for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage had bitten Ahab's leg off at the knee. The book is part whaling manual, part adventure story, part quest for revenge, and part biological textbook, and is also semi-autobiographical: the author spent over a year on a whaling ship himself.

The text in this Global Grey edition uses the American first edition of Moby Dick, and not the first British edition, which had a lot of revisions, and things taken out such as 'sacrilegious passages' (more than 1200 words), sexual matters, (including the sex life of whales), and remarks 'belittling royalty or implying a criticism of the British' (completely excluding chapter 25).

№ 1 in 20 Classic Books You Must Read Before You Die.

№ 17 in The Guardian's 100 Best Novels Written In English.

№ 21 in The Guardian's 100 Greatest Novels Of All Time.

Part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World set.

This book has 213,577 words, 397 pages in the PDF version, and was originally published in 1851.

Production notes: This ebook of Moby Dick was published by Global Grey on the 16th February 2021, and updated on the 20th April 2022. The artwork used for the cover is 'A Ship on the High Seas' by Willem van de Velde the Younger.