Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, worked on a whaling ship as a harpoonist, literally at the sharp end of that gruesome business. And he took those experiences of life at sea and combined them with a love of William Shakespeare and the King James bible, to create a great American novel about obsession and compulsion. Moby-Dick pre-empts the work of Freud and Jung and the very modern quest to understand the psychology of the human mind, and it is just as much a story of the inner journey to the recesses of the human psyche as it is a journey across the vast blue oceans.