Moby-Dick is considered a great American novel of the Romantic Period.<br />The British edition first appeared in October 1851 as The Whale, while the American edition appeared in November under its definitive title Moby-Dick.<br />The novel, dedicated to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne and his genius, is based on Melville&rsquo;s experience on a whaler and narrates the quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler Pequod, for revenge on the white wale Moby-Dick.<br /><br /><br />Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819.<br />He was a novelist and a poet from the American Renaissance.<br />His first book Typee (1846) immediately became a bestseller and so there was a sequel Omoo (1847); in 1851 he wrote Moby-Dick but the novel did not became a success. After 1857 he turned to poetry, but his popularity declined dramatically. He died in 1891.<br />Only in the 1920s started the so-called &ldquo;Melville Revival&rdquo;.