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 contains passages embarrassingly similar to passages in "Moby-Dick". The fourth book, Reverend Henry T. Cheever's "The Whale and His Captors" (1850), was used for two episodes in "Moby-Dick" but probably appeared too late in the writing of the novel to be of much more use. Melville did plunder a fifth book, William Scoresby, Jr., "An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery" (1820), though—unlike the other four books—its subject is the Greenland whale rather than the sperm whale. Although the book became the standard whaling reference soon after publication, Melville satirized and