Moby-Dick Moby-Dick Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship "Pequod", for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist. "Moby-Dick" was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as
Moby-Dick met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection "Mosses from an Old Manse" titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in "The Literary World" on August 17 and 24. Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing "Moby-Dick"" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading". In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two