Books / herman-melvilles-moby-dick
Facts about Herman Melville's Moby Dick
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Moby-Dick is approximately 206,000 words long and contains detailed chapters on the technical practices of the nineteenth-century whaling industry.
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Herman Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he greatly admired as a writer.
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Narrator Ishmael's opening line 'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most recognizable first sentences in American literature.
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The white whale in Moby-Dick was inspired in part by a real albino sperm whale known as Mocha Dick, which was notorious for attacking ships.
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Published in 1851, Moby-Dick was largely ignored during Melville's lifetime and only gained widespread recognition decades after his death in 1891.