Moby Dick (Annotated)

Or, The Whale — Critical Edition with Essay and Author Biography | Herman Melville

By: Herman Melville

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The greatest American novel ever written about obsession, the sea, and the thing that cannot be caught. This annotated edition includes an original critical essay and a full biography of Herman Melville.

Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1851 to near-total indifference. The reviews were mixed, the sales were poor, and Melville — who had poured everything he knew about whaling, philosophy, the Bible, and the darkness of the human will into 600 pages — spent the rest of his life in obscurity. He died in 1891 almost completely forgotten. Thirty years later, scholars rediscovered the novel and declared it a masterpiece. They were right. It remains the most ambitious thing American literature has ever attempted.

The story is simple: Captain Ahab lost his leg to a white sperm whale. Now he wants it dead. He takes his ship, the Pequod, and its crew across every ocean in pursuit of something that may be beyond pursuit. Ishmael, the narrator, watches it all and tries to make sense of it. He never quite manages. Neither does the reader. That is the point.

But Moby Dick is not simply a story about a whale hunt. It is a meditation on monomania and free will, on the indifference of nature and the arrogance of men who refuse to acknowledge it, on what it means to chase something that cannot be caught and cannot be named. Every chapter that stops to describe the anatomy of whales, the mechanics of harpoons, the hierarchy of a whaling ship — every apparent digression — is part of the argument. Melville built an entire world to ask one question: what destroys a man?

✦ Complete and unabridged text of the 1851 first edition.

This edition also includes:

✦ An original critical essay examining Moby Dick as the founding text of American literary ambition — how Melville absorbed Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and his own years at sea into a novel that defied every convention of his time, and why it took the world half a century to catch up with what he had made.

✦ A full biography of Herman Melville — the sailor years, the brief fame of Typee, the catastrophic reception of Moby Dick, the long silence, and the posthumous manuscript of Billy Budd found in a bread box after his death.

✦ Edition prepared and introduced by Henry Bugalho, Erato Press.

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy ✦ Novels that use a story to think — where the plot is the surface and the argument is underneath ✦ Classic American literature with critical apparatus that earns its place ✦ The sea, obsession, and the things men do when they refuse to accept limits

Ahab knew the whale would kill him. He went anyway. Melville knew the novel would ruin him. He wrote it anyway.