MOBY DICK´S 161st ANNIVERSARY

         
          Moby-Dick was published 161 years ago today in Britain - it came out in America later on 14 November 1851 - and is a book that is still considered one of the treasures of world literature.
          The book, which was originally published in England by Richard Bentley as The Whale, is a beautiful and beguiling novel, full of metaphor and imagery.
          The author Herman Melville, who was born in New York, (1819-1891) used his travels in the Pacific in the 1840s as the basis for Moby-Dick, which was published when he was 31. An example of the memorable prose is:

'There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.'


Taken and adapted from Martin Chilton´s "The easy way to read Moby Dick," in http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9616955/The-easy-way-to-read-Moby-Dick.html