Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

 

Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ear I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge.

 

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

 

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.

 

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearthstone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.

 

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things—oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp—yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were wedded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.

 

 

Published by Barnes & Noble Books 122 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10011

 

 

Moby-Dick
was first published in 1851.

 

Published in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions, and For Further Reading.

 

“Dictionary of Sea Terms” is adapted from Richard Henry Dana’s The Seaman’s Friend, originally published in 1845.

“At Melville’s Tomb,” from Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane, edited by Marc Simon. Copyright 1933, 1958, 1966 by Liveright Corporation. Copyright © 1986 by Marc Simon. Used with permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

 

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading Copyright © 2003 by Carl F. Hovde.

 

Note on Herman Melville, The World of Herman Melville and
Moby-Dick
, Inspired by
Moby-Dick
, and Comments & Questions Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

 

Barnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.

 

ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-018-1

eISBN : 97-8-141-14336-5

ISBN-10: 1-59308-018-2

LC Control Number 2003100589

 

Produced and published in conjunction with:

Fine Creative Media, Inc.

322 Eighth Avenue

New York, NY 10001

 

Michael J. Fine, President and Publisher

 

Printed in the United States of America

QM

9 11 13 15 17 19 20 18 16 14 12 10

Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, to Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. His father was an importer of French goods and his mother the daughter of a Revolutionary War hero. During a national economic depression, the family business faltered; Herman’s father was unable to stabilize it or provide an adequate income. The family moved to Albany in 1830, and in 1832 Allan Melvill died, leaving the family in debt.

Young Herman took a series of jobs to help support his mother and siblings, working as a bank clerk, a farmhand, and a teacher. He also tried to earn money by writing and in 1839 published two installments of “Fragments from a Writing Desk” in the
Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser
. However, his career as a serious, full-time writer was not to begin for another seven years. During that interval, Melville worked as a seaman on ships traveling around the world. In 1841 he sailed aboard the
Acushnet
, a whaling vessel bound for the South Seas, and spent time in the Marquesas Islands, Tahiti, and Hawaii. His foreign adventures provided material for his first two novels,
Typee
(1846) and
Omoo
(1847), which were very successful.

In 1847 Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts and a close friend of his sisters. Around the same time, he began a friendship with Evert Duyckinck, an editor of
The Literary World
, who introduced him to members of the New York literary scene. Over the next few years, he wrote articles for
The Literary World
and
Yankee Doodle
, a satirical magazine modeled on the British magazine
Punch
. In 1849 Melville published
Mardi
, in which he combined a Polynesian adventure with a doomed symbolic quest. When
Mardi
was not well received, he tried to return to his earlier, more successful storytelling mode with
Redburn
(1849) and
White-Jacket
(1850), but the books turned out to be too serious and melancholy to reach a wide audience.

In 1850 Melville purchased a farm, Arrowhead, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and thus became a neighbor to author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The two had a close friendship—Melville dedicated his masterwork,
Moby-Dick
(1851), to Hawthorne. Like his other recent novels,
Moby-Dick
was not highly acclaimed when it was first published. Critics and readers were confused and disappointed, having expected a narrative more akin to the literary-journalistic style of the author’s earlier works. The failure of
Moby-Dick
and of his subsequent novels tormented Melville. He eventually gave up writing as a profession and for nineteen years held a job as a customs inspector at New York harbor. During this time he wrote poetry, some of it reflecting the political climate of the 1860s, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Herman Melville died in 1891. It was not until the “Melville revival” of the 1920s that
Moby-Dick
and the author’s other works gained him the status in which he is held today—as one of America’s greatest writers. Melville’s short novel
Billy Budd
was published in 1924.