Moby-Dick

di Herman Melville

Moby-Dick is considered a great American novel of the Romantic Period. The British edition first appeared in October 1851 as The Whale, while the American edition appeared in November under its definitive title Moby-Dick. The novel, dedicated to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne and his genius, is based on Melville’s experience on a whaler and narrates the quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on the white wale Moby-Dick. Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819. He was a novelist and a poet from the American Renaissance. His first book Typee (1846) immediately became a bestseller and so there was a sequel Omoo (1847); in 1851 he wrote Moby-Dick but the novel did not became a success. After 1857 he turned to poetry, but his popularity declined dramatically. He died in 1891. Only in the 1920s started the so-called “Melville Revival”.