Herman Melville's masterpiece of obsession and the untamed sea, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history--featuring an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and notes by Tom Quirk.
This edition features the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's text, approved by the Center for Scholarly Editions and the Center for Editions of American Authors of the MLA.
Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read
Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend,
Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature.
Written with wonderfully redemptive humor,
Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.
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Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.
Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.
Andrew Delbanco was born in 1952. Educated at Harvard, he has lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. He writes frequently on American culture for many national journals and papers, and has co-directed a number of seminars for high school and college teachers at the National Endowment for the Humanities Center and under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among his previous works are
The Death of Satan,
Required Reading,
A New England Anthology, and
The Puritan Ordeal, which received the 1990 Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia University, where he is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities. Mr. Delbanco lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain's
Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce's
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of
The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include
Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993),
Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and
Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001).
