"Moby-Dick," Melville's masterpiece, is one of the great epics in all of literature. Ahab's idolatrous hunt for the white whale drives the narrative at a relentless pace, while Ishmael's meditations on whales and whaling, the sublime indifference of nature, and the grimy physical details of whale-oil extraction provide a reflective counterpoint. Sometimes read as a terrifying study of monomania or as a critical inquiry into the sinister effects of reducing life to symbols, "Moby-Dick" also offers colorful and comic glimpses of life aboard a whaling ship. This second volume of Melville's complete prose in The Library of America also includes two other stories of the sea: "Redburn," which relates a young man's initiation into the sailor's life, and "White-Jacket," a semi-autobiographical account of experiences in the U.S. Navy. All three are presented in the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry texts.