Moby-Dick
A schoolteacher signs on to a whaling ship out of New Bedford and finds himself aboard a vessel commanded by a man hunting one particular white whale. Melville interrupts the story for chapters on cetology, rope, religion, paint and the colour white, and those digressions are the point: the book keeps trying, and failing, to contain the ocean in a classification system.
It sold badly in 1851 and was largely forgotten until the 1920s. Reading it now, the strange structure feels modern. If the whaling chapters drag, read them as a documentary impulse rather than an obstacle between plot points.
Public-domain status
First published in 1851. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Herman Melville died in 1891, so this work has been free to republish there since 1962.
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