Call me Ishmael: three words and American literature has a new voice. Captain Ahab hunts the white whale that took his leg, and Melville hunts something even larger: the nature of obsession, of evil, of the universe itself. The novel is part adventure, part encyclopedia, part Shakespearean tragedy, and it failed completely when published. Melville spent his last decades in obscurity as a customs inspector. The twentieth century rediscovered him and placed this book at the center of the American canon. The whale is everything and nothing. The Pequod sails toward annihilation. Ishmael alone survives to tell the tale.