When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab''s whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master''s obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claimed countless human victims and destroyed many fleets. With some sinister crew members in their midst and the hazardous conditions of the sea to contend with, the expedition becomes increasingly dangerous the closer it gets to its quarry.
One of the great American novels, if not the greatest, Moby Dick epically combines rip-roaring adventure, a meticulously realistic portrayal of the whaling trade and a profound philosophical disquisition on the nature of good and evil.>
This volume, first published in 1856, includes three of the tales widely considered to be among Melville''s masterpieces. In ''Bartleby, the Scrivener'', a Wall Street lawyer hires a melancholy young clerk called Bartleby, whose sudden and mysterious refusal to work plunges the firm into disarray. ''Benito Cereno'' is the account of a mutiny on a slave ship, based on the real-life journals of an American sea captain. ''The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles'' is a series of sketches about the Galapagos Islands which was a huge success with the reading public and contains some of Melville''s most celebrated prose.
Also included in this volume are ''The Lightning-Rod Man'', ''The Bell Tower'' and a story written especially for the collection, ''The Piazza''. Taken together, these tales, in their masterful use of irony and concision, display the author of Moby Dick at his most uncompromising and compelling.>
