Moby Dick In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, and Character Index)(Annotated)

by Herman Melville, BookCaps (Editor)

Overview

An obsessed and insane captain leads his crew into dangerous waters. A young man, eager to go to sea and forget his problems, signs on with a whaling ship for the first time. A savage islander shows what it means to be brave, strong, and compassionate. A mighty white whale haunts the dreams of every whaler in the four oceans. These are the things you can expect to read in the American maritime classic, Moby Dick…but if you are like many readers, you might need a little help with Melville’s classic epic.

Along with chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis, this book features the full text of Melville’s classic novel is also included.

BookCap Study Guides are not meant to be purchased as alternatives to reading the book.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015703474
Publisher:	BookCaps Study Guides
Publication date:	09/14/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	964 KB

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