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Moby-Dick

Introduction by Larzer Ziff

Part of Everyman's Library Classics Series

Author Herman Melville
Introduction by Larzer Ziff
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Hardcover
$32.00 US
Knopf | Everyman's Library
5.35"W x 8.3"H x 1.35"D  
On sale Nov 26, 1991 | 632 Pages | 9780679405597
Grades 9-12 + AP/IB
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Moby-Dick is Herman Melville’s great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul, featuring the timeless characters Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg, and presented here in a beautiful Everyman’s Library hardcover edition.

A giant of American literature, Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, and the local was equally sublime. These qualities are on full display in Moby-Dick, his breathtaking maritime masterpiece of belief, friendship, obsession, and whaling.

Published in the same five-year span as The Scarlet Letter, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick stands alone as the ultimate achievement in that stunning period—and in all of American letters.

With an introduction by Larzer Ziff.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. When his father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories (posthumous, 1924). Though the first two novels—popular romantic adventures—sold well, Melville's more serious writing failed to attract a large audience, perhaps because it attacked the current philosophy of transcendentalism and its espoused "self-reliance." (As he made clear in the savagely comic The Confidence Man (1857), Melville thought very little of Emersonian philosophy.) He spent his later years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing only poems comprising Battle-Pieces (1866). He died in 1891, leaving Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories unpublished. View titles by Herman Melville
“[Herman Melville’s] metaphysical might makes a lot of contemporary novels seem like cotton candy.”—Molly Young, The New York Times

“Some say this is a book about everything and always one for the times, no matter what they might be…. But perhaps timelessness is the true measure of a great novel.” —Paul Daley, The Guardian

About

Moby-Dick is Herman Melville’s great adventure of the sea and the life of the soul, featuring the timeless characters Ishmael, Ahab, and Queequeg, and presented here in a beautiful Everyman’s Library hardcover edition.

A giant of American literature, Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, and the local was equally sublime. These qualities are on full display in Moby-Dick, his breathtaking maritime masterpiece of belief, friendship, obsession, and whaling.

Published in the same five-year span as The Scarlet Letter, Walden, and Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick stands alone as the ultimate achievement in that stunning period—and in all of American letters.

With an introduction by Larzer Ziff.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Author

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. When his father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856), and Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories (posthumous, 1924). Though the first two novels—popular romantic adventures—sold well, Melville's more serious writing failed to attract a large audience, perhaps because it attacked the current philosophy of transcendentalism and its espoused "self-reliance." (As he made clear in the savagely comic The Confidence Man (1857), Melville thought very little of Emersonian philosophy.) He spent his later years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing only poems comprising Battle-Pieces (1866). He died in 1891, leaving Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories unpublished. View titles by Herman Melville

Praise

“[Herman Melville’s] metaphysical might makes a lot of contemporary novels seem like cotton candy.”—Molly Young, The New York Times

“Some say this is a book about everything and always one for the times, no matter what they might be…. But perhaps timelessness is the true measure of a great novel.” —Paul Daley, The Guardian

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