MobyDick, Herman Melville
MobyDick, Herman Melville
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Moby-Dick

Author: Herman Melville

Narrator: William Hootkins

Abridged: 6 hr 2 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 06/16/2005

Synopsis

Moby-Dick is one of the great epics in all of literature. Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's meditations on whales and whaling, on the sublime indifference of nature, and on the grimy physical details of the extraction of oil provide a reflective counterpoint to the headlong idolatrous quest. Sometimes read as a terrifying study of monomania or as a critical inquiry into the effects of reducing life to symbols, Moby-Dick also offers colorful and often comic glimpses of life aboard a whaling ship.

About The Author

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on January 02, 2023

QUICK UPDATE: James Cameron totally ripped off and plagiarized Melville in the abysmally written Avatar 2. He should have listed Moby Dick in the credits…(view spoiler)[and saved the Ishmael character - the biologist - but, alas, he didn’t. (hide spoiler)] I re-read Moby-Dick following my research trips to the whaling museums of......more

Goodreads review by Vit on February 09, 2024

The narrator of this flabbergasting marine saga is an impecunious but very erudite young man possessing a sarcastic sense of humour and having a tongue-in-cheek attitude to life… Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing parti......more

Goodreads review by Federico on April 22, 2024

Dude, let it go already! Massachusetts, 1830s. Ishmael is a young mariner spending time at a local inn, resting from his last sea voyage. When the lure of the seas calls again he signs up to join the crew of the Pequod, a whaler ship leaving dock soon. In charge of the expedition, the implacable A......more

Goodreads review by s.penkevich on March 16, 2025

Love it or hate it, whenever someone asks if Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is worth reading I always enthusiastically say yes you should, yes it's worth it, yes, yes like some weirdass library Molly Bloom. An epic seafaring quest—one that is a prime example of how a major theme in literature is Don’t......more

Goodreads review by karen on June 25, 2018

i tried. Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First: In order to fac......more

Quotes

Winner of the 2012 Fifty Books/Fifty Covers show, organized by Design Observer in association with AIGA and Designers & Books

Winner of the 2014 Type Directors Club Communication Design Award

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