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Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 epic novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is centered on the sailor Ishmael 's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab , captain of the whaling ship Pequod , for vengeance against Moby Dick , the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage.
Moby Dick is a fictional white sperm whale and the main antagonist in Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick. Melville based the whale on an albino whale of that ...
Herman Melville (born Melvill; [a] August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella.
Moby Dick from Herman Melville's novel 'Moby-Dick'. On Nov. 20, 1820, a whaling ship from Nantucket, Mass., was attacked by a large sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Ishmael is a character in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), which opens with the line "Call me Ishmael." He is the first-person narrator of much of the book. Because Ishmael plays a minor role in the plot, early critics of Moby-Dick assumed that Captain Ahab was the protagonist.
According to Melville biographer Leon Howard, "Ahab is a Shakespearean tragic hero, created according to the Coleridgean formula." [9] The creation of Ahab, who apparently does not derive from any captain Melville sailed under, was heavily influenced by the observation in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lecture on Hamlet that "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one ...
Chase returned to Nantucket on June 11, 1821, to find he had a 14-month-old daughter he had never met. Four months later he had completed an account of the disaster, the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex; Herman Melville used it as one of the inspirations for his 1851 novel Moby-Dick.
As first mate of Essex, 21-year-old Owen Chase left Nantucket on August 12, 1819, on a two-and-a-half-year whaling voyage. On the morning of November 20, 1820, a sperm whale (said to be around 85 feet; 26 m) twice rammed Essex, sinking her 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 km) west of South America.