Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
For this Sesquicentennial Norton Critical Edition, the Northwestern-Newberry text of Moby-Dick has been generously footnoted to include dozens of biographical discoveries, mainly from Hershel Parker's work on his two-volume biography of Melville.
Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, the third child of Maria and Allan Gansevoort Melvill. (The final e was added to the family name later.) His father’s financial difficulties and his early death while Melville was still a youth disrupted his formal education. Instead, Melville tried his hand at a variety of occupations before joining the crew of a merchant ship bound for England in 1839. Two years later he sailed to the South Seas aboard the whaler Acushnet. His early fiction, like the novels Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), drew upon and often embellished his exotic maritime adventures, earning him both popular and critical acclaim. But by the time he published Moby-Dick in 1851, his writing career was in decline, as both sales and praise of his works dwindled. Although he would subsequently publish two more novels and a number of short stories—including the masterpieces “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”—Melville spent the last three decades of his life primarily writing poetry. Largely forgotten at the time of his death on April 19, 1891, Melville, along with his unfinished novella Billy Budd, was rediscovered and his reputation revived in the early decades of the twentieth century. Hershel Parker is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, and of the Norton Critical Edition of Melville’s The Confidence-Man and Moby Dick. He is co-editor of the multi-volume The Writings of Herman Melville (Northwestern-Newberry). Harrison Hayford is co-editor of the multi-volume The Writings of Herman Melville (Northwestern-Newberry), and editor of the Library of America Melville, in addition to many other works.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780393972832 |
| ISBN 10 | 0393972836 |
| Title | Moby-Dick |
| Author | Herman Melville |
| Series | Norton Critical Editions |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | WW Norton & Co |
| Year published | 2001-10-24 |
| Number of pages | 752 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |