Well over a century after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby- Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) shipped out in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. Literary success eventually faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. In 1863, during the Civil War, he returned to New York City, where he was born, to work as a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

Andrew Delbanco was educated at Harvard and has lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. Among his previous works are The Death of Satan, Required Reading, A New England Anthology, and The Puritan Ordeal, which received the 1990 Lionel Trilling Award at Columbia University, where he is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children. 

Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri- Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain’s Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co- editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997).

Nathaniel Philbrick is a leading authority on the history of Nantucket Island. His In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award. His latest book is Sea of Glory, about the epic U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. He has written an introduction to a new edition of Joseph Hart’s Miriam Coffin, or The Whale Fisherman, a Nantucket novel (first published in 1834) that Herman Melville relied upon for information about the island when writing Moby-Dick. In his role as director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies, Philbrick, who is also a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association, gives frequent talks about Nantucket and sailing. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a Master of Arts in American Literature from Duke. He lives on Nantucket with his wife and two children.

Mary Bercaw Edwards is a literary scholar and professor within the English department at the University of Connecticut, as well as serves as senior lecturer in literature of the sea for the Williams College-Mystic Seaport Program in maritime studies in Mystic, Connecticut. Author of a number of notable articles on Herman Melville and Moby-Dick, she circumnavigated the globe in a thirty-eight foot ketch from 1971 through 1975.

Penguin Enriched eBook Classics Features Editor Mary Bercaw Edwards provides the following specially commissioned features:

The enriched eBook format invites readers to go beyond the pages of these beloved works and gain more insight into the life and times of an author and the period in which the book was originally written for a rich reading experience.