Moby Dick; Or the Whale

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. Sailor Ishmael tells the story of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale which on an earlier voyage destroyed his ship and severed his leg at the knee. Ishmael describes Moby Dick as having prominent white areas around "a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump," the rest of his body being of stripes and patches between white and gray.