Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is often considered the greatest American novel – a vast epic that combines deep philosophy and high adventure as well as rich comedy and profound tragedy. Moby-Dick also offers a particularly diverse array of characters of various types, personalities, and ethnic backgrounds, and its styles are as varied as the people it depicts. Full of humorous dialects and idioms and brimming with probing, impassioned, poetic speeches, Melville’s novel explores the fascinating world of whale-hunting in the mid-nineteenth century, even as it also explores some of the most perennial questions about the purposes and meanings of life. The final impact of the book, when enraged whale meets pursuing ship, is one of the most memorable episodes in all of American literature.

This volume and author of nearly 30 books and over 300 essays) is designed to help make Melville’s great novel more readily accessible to a wide audience, especially students and everyday readers. Containing numerous essays by many prominent Melville scholars, the book places Melville and his epic novel in their various historical contexts while also showing how the novel continues to be relevant – and powerful – today. The volume seeks to show that Moby-Dick is no mere period piece but instead fully deserves its reputation as perhaps the greatest work of American fiction.