Moby Dick — The Companion Edition (eBook)

"Call me Ishmael."

With three words, Herman Melville opens the greatest American novel of the sea — the story of the whaleship Pequod, her one-legged Captain Ahab, and his monomaniac hunt for the white whale that took his leg. Published in 1851, the book failed in its author's lifetime and was rescued by the twentieth century, which recognized it for what it is: a whaling manual, a tragedy, a comedy, a sermon, and a metaphysical quest bound into a single enormous, inexhaustible book.

This is the complete United States first-edition text — Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Harper & Brothers, New York, November 1851) — verified against the 1851 Harper printing itself. It matters which text you read: the English edition, published a month earlier in London as The Whale, dropped the Epilogue — the pages that explain how Ishmael lived to tell the tale — along with some thirty-five passages. This edition follows the American text throughout, Epilogue included, and restores the dedication page to Nathaniel Hawthorne that many reprints quietly drop. The 1851 edition was published unillustrated; this edition invents no period art program and tells you so.

Inside this edition:

• The complete, unabridged 1851 novel — the Etymology and Extracts, all 135 chapters, and the Epilogue (207,804 words)

• A new introduction — the 1851 double publication and its failure, and the revival that made the book immortal

• Who's Who — Ishmael, Ahab, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo, Pip, Fedallah, and the rest, verified against the text

• Five explainers: the Nantucket whale fishery and the Pequod's articles · whale species and the cetology chapters · the Essex, the real whaleship sunk by a whale in 1820 · whaleships and try-works · the book's biblical naming web

• A short life of Herman Melville

• A plain-spoken note on the period text — the whaling industry's realities and its mixed crews, text unaltered

• An appendix, "Two First Editions" — how the London and New York printings of 1851 differ, and why the Epilogue is the hinge of the whole book

• Discussion questions for ten chapter groups, spoiler-fenced, plus a whole-book set

The novel's text is public domain worldwide (Melville died in 1891). All companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with any film or with any other edition — and no film's whale appears in these pages.

Formats: EPUB eBook ($9.99, this listing). The printable Book Club Kit for this edition is available in this store.