Moby Dick - Pocket Classics, C-7 Author:Irwin Shapiro (Adapter), Herman Melville, Alex Nino (Illustrator) Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, the novel by Herman Melville, was published in London in October 1851 and published a month later in the United States. Moby-Dick is generally regarded as its author's masterpiece and one of the greatest American novels. The basic plot of Moby-Dick is simple. The narrator (who asks to be called "Ishmael&qu... more »ot;) tells of the last voyage of the ship Pequod out of New Bedford, Mass. Captain Ahab is obsessed with the pursuit of the white whale Moby-Dick, which finally kills him. On that level, the work is an intense, superbly authentic narrative. Its theme and central figure, however, are reminiscent of Job in his search for justice and of Oedipus in his search for truth. The novel's richly symbolic language and tragic hero are indicative of Melville's deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges.« less