With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of x2018;Poetry Review x2019;.

Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab x2019;s quest to avenge the whale that x2018;reaped x2019; his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab x2019;s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.

Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel x2019;s narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:

in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his x2018;mighty theme x2019; x2013; not only the whale but all things sublime x2013; Melville breathes in the world x2019;s great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.