MOBY-DICK OR THE WHALE

　　Written by one of America's greatest authors, Moby-Dick is a work of tremendous power and depth-one of world literature's great poetic epics. In the novel, published in 1851 after sixteen months of writing, Herman Melville recounts the Promethean quest of Captain Ahab, who, having lost a leg in a earlier battle with White Whale, is determined to catch the beast and destroy it. By the time readers meet Ahab, he is a vengeful, crazed, and terror-provoking figure, for Moby Dick has come to represent for him all the evil in the world.
　　The relentless voyage of Ahab and his crew, a finely etched group of weird and wonderful characters who seem both flesh-and-blood individuals and symbolic of the varying qualities of men, becomes a masterful drama of life at sea. The drama is made more fascinating by Melville's eloquent style-a combination of the journalistic, colloquial, and poetic-and the themes and subjects he pursues-whales and whaling; mean's need for love and comradeship; and the fury of Ahab for the whale.
　　Through realistic storytelling, symbolic allegory, and allusive and figurative language, Melville achieves in Moby-dicka special intensity that readers will marvel at, and not soon forget.

Great Expectations (MM) / Dickens(..	Phantom of the Opera (MM) / Leroux(..	丽江的柔软时光(最新珍藏版)	消失的地平线（英文版）	西线无战事
柬埔寨五月盛放	一个陌生女人的来信——斯台芬·茨威..	吾国与吾民 （英文版）	京华烟云(英文版)	一九八四

　　Herman Melville was born in 1819 in New York City. After his father's death he left school for a series of clerical jobs before going to sea as a young man of nineteen. At twenty-one he shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet and began a series of adventures in the South Seas that would last for three years and form the basis for his first two novels, Typee and Omoo. Although these two novels sold well and gained for Melville a measure of fame, nineteenth-century readers were puzzled by the experiments with form that he began with his third novel, Mardi, and continued brilliantly in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. During his later years spent working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville published only poems, compiled in a collection entitled Battle-Pieces.

　　Written by one of America's greatest authors, Moby-Dick is a work of tremendous power and depth-one of world literature's great poetic epics. In the novel, published in 1851 after sixteen months of writing, Herman Melville recounts the Promethean quest of Captain Ahab, who, having lost a leg in a earlier battle with White Whale, is determined to catch the beast and destroy it. By the time readers meet Ahab, he is a vengeful, crazed, and terror-provoking figure, for Moby Dick has come to represent for him all the evil in the world.
　　The relentless voyage of Ahab and his crew, a finely etched group of weird and wonderful characters who seem both flesh-and-blood individuals and symbolic of the varying qualities of men, becomes a masterful drama of life at sea. The drama is made more fascinating by Melville's eloquent style-a combination of the journalistic, colloquial, and poetic-and the themes and subjects he pursues-whales and whaling; mean's need for love and comradeship; and the fury of Ahab for the whale.
　　Through realistic storytelling, symbolic allegory, and allusive and figurative language, Melville achieves in Moby-dicka special intensity that readers will marvel at, and not soon forget.

LOOMINGS
THE CARPET-BAG
THE SPOUTER-INN
THE COUNTERPANE
BREAKFAST
THE STREET
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EXCERPT
Chapter I: Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs -- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the Battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? -- are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as
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