Moby Dick

“Moby Dick is an explosive as well as a germinal book. It tore through the conventions of a society and marked the end of an epoch which it celebrated. The mixture of satire and farce during the first hundred pages of the novel foreshadows Mark Twain and recalls the Elizabethans in the narrow streets of New Bedford where cannibals and savages mingle with New England farm boys those dark streets where, at night, you may see a candle moving about like a candle in a tomb. The opening section of Melville’s epic is a remarkable episode in our literature. But come aboard the Pequod ‘a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy’-and judge for yourself.”

From the Introduction by Maxwell Geismar