Herman Melville

The chronicle of a young seaman who joins the crew of the whaling ship Pequod, led by the fanatical Captain Ahab, a sailor whose obsession with pursuing the white whale Moby Dick threatens to lead them all to disaster.

"Inspired by Melville's own experiences on the high seas, this classic adventure tale pits two sailors against an island of cannibals After six months of relentless battering by the turbulent South Pacific, the whaling ship known as the " Dolly " is beginning to resemble a swollen and cracking prison. For Tommo, it's been six months of little to eat but stale biscuits, six months of steady abuse and derision from his shipmates, six months with nothing...

"Herman Melville towers among American writers not only for his powerful novels, but also for the stirring novellas and short stories that flowed from his pen. Two of the most admired of these -- "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" -- first appeared as magazine pieces and were then published in 1856 as part of a collection of short stories entitled The Piazza Tales. "Bartleby" (also known as "Bartleby the Scrivener") is an intriguing moral allegory set...

Presents a twist on themes from Moby Dick in the story of a proud warrior whale pod that attacks a ship before pursuing a near-mythical adversary on a vengeful hunt that risks the worlds of both whales and humans.

"Herman Melville ranks with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as one of the three great American poets of the nineteenth century. Whether meditating on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, the mysteries of faith and doubt in the Holy Land, or the strange relationship between the Maldive Shark and the pilot fish that glide before "his Gorgonian head," Melville's verse combines precise physical detail and rich metaphysical speculation in an unorthodox...