1: Moby Dick

"Call me Ishmael." With these three words, Herman Melville began Moby Dick - perhaps the most important American novel of the 19th Century. Yet this great writer was almost forgotten by the time he died, and was even listed as Henry Melville in the New York Times obituary.

The downturn in his career was actually due to Moby Dick. Melville had previously been a successful writer of maritime adventure stories, but then he penned this ambitious tale of a maddened sea captain, obsessed with hunting down a white whale, and it proved a little too much for readers at the time.

Even critics were puzzled by Melville’s poetic, almost Biblical style of writing. It was only after his death that the book became accepted as the masterpiece it is - a compelling story that that also tackles big ideas like man’s place in nature, the need for meaning in life, and the nature of America itself.