Moby Dick was a whale, a very big whale. It is also a book, a very big book, written by Herman Melville and published in 1851. It was initially a commercial failure, this tale of Captain Ahab on a whaling ship named the Pequod on his mad quest for vengeance on the giant white sperm whale of the title that had chomped off Ahab’s leg on a previous encounter. The story’s narrator, a seaman along for the journey, opens with what is arguably the most famous first line in English literary history, “Call me Ishmael.”

“Moby-Dick,” the book, entered the life of artist and writer Dmitry Samarov two decades ago when he was 33. “I was going through a divorce and came upon a cheap paperback copy of the book,” he says. “It was a crazy time for me and I was grasping at anything that might help me. This

See Full Page