Moby Dick

The novel is semi-autobiographical: Herman Melville had had his own experience of whaling, having spent a year and a half aboard a whaling ship and further years traveling the world in the early 1840s. Herman used the knowledge gained from his experiences and wide reading on the subject to furnish Moby Dick with an almost encyclopaedic quality. The literary style varies widely, veering from soliloquies and staged scenes to dream sequences to comprehensive lists of ships’ provisions, but everything serves to further detail the world that’s being painted.

Presented here is the New York edition, which was published later than the London edition and reverted numerous changes the original publishers had made, as well as including the initially-omitted epilogue.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.