A New Look at the Classics - Pt. 3 Moby Dick

Now, Moby Dick was written in 1851 by Herman Melville, and you know what? It was a bust when it came out.

Who's going to read it? 585 pages long.

That's way too long.

Anyway, poor guy dies, and the book takes off.

Everybody wants to read it, and it becomes one of the great literary classics in American history.

Now, what's interesting about it is that he actually was writing, it's inspired, I'll call it that.

It was inspired by a true story.

There was these two stories that were contemporary to his day.

People all knew about them.

The first one was this, and it was about a albino whale, a white whale, sperm whale, in the South Pacific off the Mocha Islands.

Therefore, his name was Mocha Dick.

And so Melville takes that name and changes it to Moby for his fictionalized purposes.

So that's part of the story.

The second part of the story is that he was actually a whaler himself.

So he knew these stories and knew these people.

And out on Nantucket, there was this mission, this whaling mission that went out.

And it was doomed because the captain was obsessed.

And he was chasing these whales, these giant whales, and trying to defeat them.

Turned out the other way around and the ship was destroyed and terrible, horrible things happened.

It's been immortalized in a fantastic movie called In the Heart of the Sea.

And this was produced by Ron Howard.

He always does a great job.

And if you love adventure stories, you will love this movie.

So I can recommend that.

But anyway, he takes Mocha Dick and he takes this story of In the Heart of the Sea.