Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

Front Cover
Penguin, 2002 M12 31 - 720 pages
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. 

Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

From inside the book

Contents

VII
3
VIII
9
IX
13
X
28
XI
33
XII
36
XIII
39
XIV
43
LXXVIII
348
LXXIX
353
LXXX
359
LXXXI
364
LXXXII
368
LXXXIII
371
LXXXIV
373
LXXXV
378

XV
46
XVI
55
XVII
59
XVIII
61
XIX
64
XX
69
XXI
72
XXII
76
XXIII
90
XXIV
96
XXV
100
XXVI
104
XXVII
107
XXVIII
111
XXIX
116
XXX
118
XXXI
123
XXXII
124
XXXIII
128
XXXIV
133
XXXV
137
XXXVI
141
XXXVII
142
XXXVIII
145
XXXIX
158
XL
161
XLI
167
XLII
174
XLIII
182
XLIV
184
XLV
186
XLVI
187
XLVII
194
XLVIII
204
XLIX
213
L
215
LI
221
LII
230
LIII
233
LIV
236
LV
247
LVI
250
LVII
253
LVIII
257
LIX
260
LX
265
LXI
285
LXII
290
LXIII
294
LXIV
297
LXV
300
LXVI
303
LXVII
307
LXVIII
313
LXIX
315
LXX
317
LXXI
325
LXXII
328
LXXIII
330
LXXIV
332
LXXV
336
LXXVI
338
LXXVII
341
LXXXVI
381
LXXXVII
384
LXXXVIII
395
LXXXIX
399
XC
402
XCI
405
XCII
410
XCIII
415
XCIV
428
XCV
432
XCVI
436
XCVII
440
XCVIII
447
XCIX
450
C
455
CI
459
CII
461
CIII
466
CIV
467
CV
470
CVI
476
CVII
483
CVIII
488
CIX
493
CX
496
CXI
500
CXII
505
CXIII
508
CXIV
511
CXV
516
CXVI
519
CXVII
525
CXVIII
527
CXIX
530
CXX
534
CXXI
536
CXXII
539
CXXIII
541
CXXIV
543
CXXV
546
CXXVI
553
CXXVII
554
CXXVIII
556
CXXIX
557
CXXX
561
CXXXI
565
CXXXII
569
CXXXIII
573
CXXXIV
576
CXXXV
580
CXXXVI
582
CXXXVII
587
CXXXVIII
589
CXXXIX
594
CXL
604
CXLI
613
CXLII
625
CXLIII
629
CXLIV
635
CXLV
651
CXLVI
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About the author (2002)

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 SatanRequired ReadingA 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).

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