VIDEO, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

 In this video we could see a small trailer of the movie "moby dick" that is based on the book by Herman Melville.

in conclusion, Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819, where he died in 1891. He was married for 47 years to Elizabeth Shaw, with whom he had four children.
Melville wrote 12 novels; the first 5 refer to his years as a sailor and in the Pacific islands.
In his last years he also dedicated himself to poetry, highlighting Clarel, an epic poem of 16,000 verses, written after a trip to the Holy Land.
Moby Dick was considered one of the great novels of the nineteenth century, Moby Dick) was not the only or the most popular writing by Herman Melville, whose life was marked by great ups and downs.

I recommend that you watch the movie of moby dick or if you prefer to read the novel so that you can live the experience and the feelings that this author conveys in his works. 
  

LITERARY GENRE

Novels
Essays
Poetry

WORKS

His first book, Typee, was based on his time spent among the supposedly cannibalistic but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. The book praises the islanders and their natural, harmonious life, and criticizes the Christian missionaries, who Melville found less genuinely civilized than the people they came to convert.

 Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like man,” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic connotations. In chapter 15, “The Right Whale’s Head,” the narrator says that the Right Whale is a Stoic and the Sperm Whale is a Platonian, referring to two classical schools of philosophy. Although Melville’s novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite his heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In MobyDick, Melville challengesEmerson’s optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab. Facts about the whale and whaling cannot explain Moby-Dick; on the contrary, the facts themselves tend to become symbols, and every fact is obscurely related in a cosmic web to every other fact.

Characters

Moby Dick is probably one of the most dreaded stories for students in high school and college classrooms, because it's known for being extremely long, elaborate and boring. What most readers, or prospective readers, don't know is that the novel has influenced many areas of current culture, including the most famous coffee chain in America. Yep, Starbucks. The Starbucks founders chose the name because of its association with the ocean. (Initially, they were going to name it after the ship in the story, the 'Pequod', but that sounded kind of gross.)
But if the pop-culture connection isn't enough to catch your interest, consider that the author Herman Melville, who is writing about a bunch of seamen searching for a gigantic sperm whale with the name 'Dick,' did not fail to notice the obvious humor in such things. And while the story is a rather serious piece about evil and revenge, it's full of vulgar sex jokes that would make even the raunchiest of readers blush. In other words, the story is entertaining on a variety of levels, and worth the read, in spite of its reputation.

Ishmael, Captain Ahab and Moby Dick are central characters in the story

There are tons of characters in the story, some having more definition than others, but for the most part, there are three we need to remember. Ishmael is our 'narrator' who is about to start out on his first whaling adventure. Captain Ahab is the captain of the ship called the Pequod. He is on a vengeful hunt for a huge white whale called Moby Dick.
And who, or what, is Moby Dick? Well, aside from being a giant white whale, about 90 feet long, he is the object in the story onto which all of the characters sort of project their own interpretations. He is the central part of the story even though he only shows up in three chapters. Three out of 135.

ROMANTIC PERIOD, 1820-1860

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation produced in the United States. In the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the “romance,” a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to communicate complex and subtle meanings.

CURIOUS FACTS

- Much of Melville’s later work – the majority of which is now his most highly regarded fiction was neither critically nor commercially successful when it was first published. Between 1863 and 1887, an average of 23 copies of Moby-Dick – now his most widely read book were sold each year. It now sells more copies each year than were sold in the entire nineteenth century and is acknowledged as a classic.
-Another giant of nineteenth-century American fiction, Nathaniel Hawthorne – perhaps best known for his novel about adultery, The Scarlet Letter – lived next door to Melville for a time. Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne.

BIOGRAPHY

Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, the third of eight children. His father, Allan Melvill (the family changed the spelling of the last name around 1838) was of unsteady temperament but a prosperous importer and merchant in New York City. His mother, Maria Gansevoort, was a devoutly religious, somewhat critical woman from a colonial family of social standing in Albany.Herman had a troubled childhood. A bout with scarlet fever at the age of seven left his eyesight permanently damaged, and, following his father's death, the family was so poor that Herman's education was sporadic. Despite his weak eyes, Melville was an avid reader and delighted in finding, in his late twenties, an edition of Shakespeare with print large enough to accommodate him. But his real education was at sea. He could say, with Ishmael, "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."
At the age of thirty, Melville sought stability in a marriage (1847) to Elizabeth "Lizzie" Knapp Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court and a friend of his sister Helen. Relying on borrowed money from his wife's family, Melville purchased a farm (1850), which he called Arrowhead, in Massachusetts. Nearby lived Nathaniel Hawthorne, fifteen years Melville's senior, who published his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, that year; the two became friends.
Melville's writing career, much of which was inspired by his travels, began with the publication of Typee in 1846, followed relatively shortly after by Omoo (1847). The reaction to these first two novels was encouraging enough to make Melville believe, initially, that he had a future as a professional writer.
Melville left a few unpublished poems and, most notably, the fine novella Billy Budd, Foretopman, which was finally published in 1924. Although Melville was thought to be one of the finer young writers in America at the end of the 1840s, by his death he was nearly forgotten. Only one obituary noted his passing on September 28, 1891.

SYNOPSIS

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