No American masterpiece casts quite as awesome a shadow as Melville's monumental Moby Dick .Mad Captain Ahab's quest for the White Whale is a timeless epic--a stirring tragedy of vengeance and obsession, a searing parable about humanity lost in a universe of moral ambiguity.It is the greatest sea story ever told.Far ahead of its own time, Moby Dick was largely misunderstood and unappreciated by Melville's contemporaries.Today, however, it is indisputably a classic.As D.H. Lawrence wrote, Moby Dick "commands a stillness in the soul, an awe . . . [It is] one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world."