Moby Dick: The Whale

by Herman Melville, Redaktion Gröls-Verlag (Editor)

Overview

The real background for the descriptions in Moby-Dick were Melville's own experiences as well as events that became known to him, which in turn were based on true events. The whaling ship Union, for example, set sail from Nantucket on September 19, 1807, for the South Atlantic. On the night of October 10, the ship was rocked by a ramming shock that caused a water intrusion. The crew was forced to abandon ship and was able to reach the Azores in their boats after seven days. The captain suspected the cause of the ramming impact was an encounter with a whale. The whaling ship Essex from Nantucket was sunk by ramming by a sperm whale on November 20, 1820. After the sinking of the Essex, the 20-man crew rescued themselves in three whaling boats. The men survived only by feeding on their comrades who starved to death en route and one who was shot. Gröls Classics - English Edition

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783988289452
Publisher:	Gröls Verlag
Publication date:	01/27/2023
Pages:	474
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 1.06(d)

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.

Date of Birth:

August 1, 1819

Date of Death:

September 28, 1891

Place of Birth:

New York, New York

Place of Death:

New York, New York

Education:

Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15