There's more to him than "Moby Dick" of course. The guy's poetry was sometimes pretty good, and " Bartleby the Scrivener" was a very fine short story. As for "Moby Dick," yes there are parts when I'm thinking, "Well Herman, I really didn't feel like knowing the difference between the two types of knots that sailors commonly use to keep this part of the ship in place.." or what not. However, aside from the digressions into things like that, I think the book is excellent...

"Billy Budd" and "Typee" are magnificent.

"Moby Dick" on the other hand is a strong contender for the most over-rated novel of all time.

Melville has two flashes of genius, the rest of his work is average or below average, and his "great novel" is near garbage.

Long-winded, tedious, clunky ... yet absolutely indispensable. No writer interests me as much as Melville, because no writer demanded as much of himself. My favorite quotation in all of literature occurs in Moby-Dick, where Melville announces his restless ambition in this way:

"Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it."

While Moby-Dick is all over the place, it's totally readable. "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno," and Billy Budd are much more crystalline, almost perfect, but they still have the same impatient energy. Can you tell I love this guy?

For Moby Dick,this man needed an editor...it would be a GREAT 120-200 page story.He could have saved the rest for a thick tome on Cetology.

A great American novelist, and while I for one do not feel Moby Dick is overrated, I have to point out Melville wrote a whole lot more, and it is not to be missed. Billy Budd is a near-perfect story; Bartelby, likewise, and is thoroughly modern: it could have been written by Sartre's twin Brooklyn brother. He's a poet, too, but I think his verse does not reach the Himalayan standard of his prose.

I learned alot about the sea, whales ect.reading Melville, and got great stories at the same time.

Homoeroticism is everywhere in his work. A brilliant man finds a gay voice.

Can't get enough about rigging.

Great ideas, but didn't have the capacity to be so verbose. It's a shame.