Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville, sailor Ishmael's account of the obsessive quest for vengeance of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, on the white whale Moby Dick that on the ship's previous whaling voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist literature.