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 he published another version of the text which, despite numerous variations, may be considered essentially the same text. F. Barron Freeman published a second text in 1948, edited on different principles, as "Melville's Billy Budd" (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). He believed he stayed closer to what Melville wrote, but still relied on Weaver's text, with what are now considered mistaken assumptions and textual errors. Subsequent editions of "Billy Budd" up through the early 1960s are, strictly speaking, versions of one or the other of these two basic texts. After several years of study, in 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M.