On May 1, 1850, a thirty-year-old American novelist named Herman Melville described his current work in progress in a letter to fellOW writer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. "About the 'whaling voyage,'" Melville wrote, "I am half way in the work... It will be a strange sort of a book, tho, I fear; blubber is blubber you know, tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs. as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;-& to oook the thing up, one must needsthrow m a litele fancy, which from the nature of the thing,must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. The book he described was, of course, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, andit appeared in the United States just a year and a half later...

HERMANMELVILLE was born in. 1819 in New York City. After his father"s death he left school for a series of clerical jobs before going to sea as a young man of nineteen. At twenty-one be shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet and began a series of adventures in the South Seas that would last for three. years and form the basis for his first twonovels, Typee and Omoo. Although those two novels sold well and gained for Melville a measure of fame, nineteenth-century readers were puzzled.by the experiments with formthat he began with|his third novel, Mardi, and continued brilliantly in his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. During his later years spent working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, Melville published only poems, compiled in a collection titled Battle-Pieces, and died in 1891 with Billy Budd, Sailor, now considered a classic, still unpublished.

Introduction

MOBY-DICK

Etymology

Extracts

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

Ahab

Enter Ahab;to him , Stubb

The Pipe

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