Bestselling and beloved classic now with apparatus including: images, chronology, filmography, and essays spanning the themes of whaling, sermons, and cannibalism in Melville's novel. "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it." So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literature. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.