Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville . The book is 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. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance , 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 reputat
Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850 and finished 18 months later, a year after he had anticipated. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. The white whale is modeled on a notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick , and the book's ending is based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life
The book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale , in a single-volume edition in New York in November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley , censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change of the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as "Moby Dick", without the hyphen. [4] Reviewers in Britain were largely