Herman Melville Google doodle marks 161st anniversary of Moby-Dick

Herman Melville, celebrated author and the man behind the all-time classic Moby-Dick, is the inspiration behind Thursday's Google doodle.

Moby-Dick is the great epic of whales and waling. It tells the story of Ahab, Captain of the Pequod, and of his revenge-mission and insane pursuit of Moby Dick, the fierce white whale. Among Ahab's crew is Ishmael, a young man undergoing a gruelling rite of passage and pursuing a different salvation. As the Pequod circles the globe like a latter-day Noah's Ark, so Moby Dick ranges and digresses through space and time, through mythologies, religions and philosophies.

The Google doodle depicts a scene from the book where Captain Ahab leads a boat to strike at the huge white whale.

Herman Melville had written Typee and Omoo before he wrote, what he believed was his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. He was shocked by the less-than-flattering reception the book received. One critic described it as "[A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed."

It wasn't until way after Herman Melville's death and the end of World War I that Herman Melville was rediscovered and Moby-Dick found favour with the critics of the time. The book is now, of course, regarded as one of the all-time classics and considered essential reading for students in many countries across the world.

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