Moby Read Online

Mansfield (1953).

Olson, Charles. Call Me Ishmael (1947).

Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996, 2002.

Parker, Hershel, and Harrison Hayford, eds. Moby-Dick as Doubloon (1970).

Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. New York: Viking, 2000.

Rogin, Michael. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Rosenberry, Edward. Melville and the Comic Spirit (1955).

Seelye, John. Melville: The Ironic Diagram (1970).

Smith, Henry Nash. “The Madness of Ahab,” in Democracy and the Novel (1978).

Vincent, Howard P. The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (1949).

Wenke, John. Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and Forms of Philosophical Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1995.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

This Penguin Classics edition of Melville’s Moby-Dick reproduces the authoritative Approved Text of the Center for Scholarly Editions (Modern Language Association of America), published by the Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library in 1988 and edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle.

IN TOKEN
OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS,
This Book is Inscribed
TO
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

ETYMOLOGY

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)

[The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.]

Etymology

“While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.”

Hackluyt.

“WHALE. * * * Sw. and Dan. hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for in Dan. hvalt is arched or vaulted.”

Webster’s Dictionary.

“WHALE. * * * It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. Wallen; A.S. Walw-ian, to roll, to wallow.”

Richardson’s Dictionary.

EXTRACTS

(Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian.)

[It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am.