Call me Ishmael. With those three words, one of literature's most extraordinary voyages begins. Aboard the whaling ship Pequod, Captain Ahab drives his crew toward a confrontation with the great white whale that took his leg — a creature he has elevated from animal to symbol, from adversary to obsession. Melville's novel is many things at once: a thrilling sea adventure, a precise and strange encyclopaedia of the whaling industry, a philosophical meditation on fate and free will, and an anatomy of obsession so total it becomes indistinguishable from madness. Ahab's monomaniacal quest pulls every man on the ship into its gravity, until the hunt for one creature becomes a reckoning with the indifference of the universe itself. Vast, digressive, and magnificent, this is the great American novel that America spent decades learning to read.
