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
Billy Budd 10, 1924). In relatively short order he and several other influential British literati had managed to canonize "Billy Budd", placing it alongside "Moby-Dick" as one of the great books of Western literature. Wholly unknown to the public until 1924, "Billy Budd" by 1926 had joint billing with the book that had just recently been firmly established as a literary masterpiece. In its first text and subsequent texts, and as read by different audiences, the book has kept that high status ever since. In 1990 the Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker pointed out that all the early estimations of "Billy