Adapted from Why Read Moby-Dick?, by Nathaniel Philbrick, to be published this month by viking; © 2011 by the author.

Even though I hadn’t read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.

Sometimes he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school, when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice in the matter, that I finally read Moby-Dick. I soon found myself in the worst position an adolescent male can ever know: having to admit that maybe, just maybe, his father had been right all along.

The voice of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had not yet managed to find. Thirty-seven years later, after reading Moby-Dick cover to cover at least a dozen times, I still count Ishmael as a beloved soulmate and spiritual adviser. Not only is he funny, wise, and bighearted, he is the consummate survivor, for it is he and he alone who lives to tell about Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale. For me, Moby-Dick is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual—the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Much of this has to do, I think, with the extraordinary historical moment at which Herman Melville wrote his masterpiece. In the fall of 1850, when he moved his family from New York City to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, the United States was in the midst of pushing its way west. Railroads had begun to knit the interior of the nation into an iron tracery of ceaseless, smoke-belching movement. Steamboats ventured up once inaccessible rivers. With the winning of the Mexican War, in 1848, America’s future as a bi-coastal nation was sealed. When word reached the East Coast later that year that gold had been discovered in California, thousands upon thousands of prospectors quickly made that future an accomplished fact.

But there was a problem with this juggernaut: a lie festered at the ideological core of the then 30 states of America. Despite the fact that her founders had promised liberty and freedom for all, the southern half of the country was economically dependent on the slavery of Africans. And with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that any escaped slaves be handed over to the authorities, slavery was no longer just a southern problem. Antagonisms that had lain dormant for decades could no longer be contained, and an eruption of terrible violence appeared inevitable.

Melville’s intense imaginative engagement with these forces of turmoil and change meant that the novel he wrote and re-wrote over the course of a year beginning in September 1850 would be about much more than a whaling voyage to the Pacific. Indeed, contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that had contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 and were about to precipitate a civil war in 1861, and that have continued to drive this country’s ever contentious march across 160 years, up through the current “war on terror.” This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations of readers have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or, closer to our own day, as a profit-mad, deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as one of several power-crazed Middle Eastern dictators in 2011.