Herman Melville 
Moby Dick 

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of ‘Poetry Review’.Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab s quest to avenge the whale that reaped his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel s narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his mighty theme not only the whale but all things sublime Melville breathes in the world s great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.