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).

Introduction
Suggestions for Further Reading
A Note on the Text

Etymology
Extracts

Moby Dick

Loomings
The Carpet Bag
The Spouter-Inn
The Counterpane
Breakfast
The Street
The Chapel
The Pulpit
The Sermon
A Bosom Friend
Nightgown
Biographical
Wheelbarrow
Nantucket
Chowder
The Ship
The Ramadan
His Mark
The Prophet
All Astir
Going Aboard
Merry Christmas
The Lee Shore
The Advocate
Postscript
Knights and Squires
Knights and Squires
Ahab
Enter Ahab; to him, Stubb
The Pipe
Queen Mab
Cetology
The Specksynder
The Cabin Table
The Mast-Head
The Quarter-Deck • Ahab and all
Sunset
Dusk
First Night-Watch
Forecastle---Midnight
Moby Dick
The Whiteness of the Whale
Hark!
The Chart
The Affidavit
Surmises
The Mat-Maker
The First Lowering
The Hyena
Ahab's Boat and Crew---Fedallah
The Spirit-Spout
The Pequod meets the Albatross
The Gam
The Town Ho's Story
Monstrous Pictures of Whales
Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales
Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, &c.
Brit
Squid
The Line
Stubb kills a Whale
The Dart
The Crotch
Stubb's Supper
The Whale as a Dish
The Shark Massacre
Cutting In
The Blanket
The Funeral
The Sphynx
The Pequod meets the Jeroboam • Her Story
The Monkey-rope
Stubb & Flask kill a Right Whale
The Sperm Whale's Head
The Right Whale's Head
The Battering-Ram
The Great Heidelburgh Tun
Cistern and Buckets
The Prairie
The Nut
The Pequod meets the Virgin
The Honor and Glory of Whaling
Jonah Historically Regarded
Pitchpoling
The Fountain
The Tail
The Grand Armada
Schools & Schoolmasters
Fast Fish and Loose Fish
Heads or Tails
The Pequod meets the Rose Bud
Ambergris
The Castaway
A Squeeze of the Hand
The Cassock
The Try-Works
The Lamp
Stowing Down & Clearing Up
The Doubloon
The Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London
The Decanter
A Bower in the Arsacides
Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton
The Fossil Whale
Does the Whale Diminish?
Ahab's Leg
The Carpenter
The Deck • Ahab and the Carpenter
The Cabin • Ahab and Starbuck
Queequeg in his Coffin
The Pacific
The Blacksmith
The Forge
The Gilder
The Pequod meets the Bachelor
The Dying Whale
The Whale-Watch
The Quadrant
The Candles
The Deck
Midnight, on the Forecastle
Midnight, Aloft
The Musket
The Needle
The Log and Line
The Life-Buoy
Ahab and the Carpenter
The Pequod meets the Rachel
The Cabin •Ahab and Pip
The Hat
The Pequod meets the Delight
The Symphony
The Chase • First Day
The Chase • Second Day
The Chase • Third Day
Epilogue

List of Textual Emendations
Explanatory Notes
Glossary of Nautical Terms
Maps and Illustrations