Macmillan Collector’s Library: Moby-dick

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Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York. He worked at various jobs, including shipping on the whalerAchshnet and a stint in the US Navy before settling in Massachusetts and starting to write. His first two novels,Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), were fictionalized accounts of his travels and were his most popular works during his lifetime. After marrying in 1847, Melville wrote a series of populist novels for money. With Moby-Dick (1851) he changed course - partly under the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne - but the novel's complexity lost him readers. After publishing two more novels Melville took a job as a customs inspector in New York City harbour and turned to writing poetry. He died in 1891. An unfinished novel, Billy Budd, Sailor, was published in 1924.

Complete and unabridged. Teeming with ideas and imagery, and with its extraordinary intensity sustained by mischievous irony and moments of exquisite beauty, Moby-Dick is both a great American epic and a profoundly imaginative literary creation. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an afterword by Nigel Cliff. On board the whaling ship Pequod a crew of wise men and fools, renegades and seeming phantoms is hurled through treacherous seas by crazed Captain Ahab, a man hell-bent on hunting down the mythic White Whale. Herman Melville transforms the little world of the whale ship into a crucible where mankind's fears, faith and frailties are pitted against a relentless fate.

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