Moby-Dick

Winner of the 2012 Fifty Books/Fifty Covers show, organized by Design Observer in association with AIGA and Designers & Books

Winner of the 2014 Type Directors Club Communication Design Award

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Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City. After his father died bankrupt when Melville was twelve, he held various jobs, including bank clerk, cabin boy, and elementary schoolteacher, before joining the whaler Acushnet in 1841. He deserted the ship in the Marquesas in 1842 and eventually returned to Boston as an ordinary seaman.

His early books, based on these adventures, brought him immediate success. By 1850, he was married, owned a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and was neighbors with Nathaniel Hawthorne. During this period, he wrote his masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

Literary success waned as Melville’s complex work began to alienate readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in 1857, he shifted from prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, he moved back to New York City, where he worked as a deputy inspector in the Custom House from 1866 to 1885. He died in New York City in 1891. His unfinished prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was rediscovered and published in 1924.

Andrew Delbanco was born in 1952. He is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad. Delbanco frequently writes about American culture for national journals and papers. His previous works include The Death of Satan, Required Reading, A New England Anthology, and The Puritan Ordeal, which won the 1990 Lionel Trilling Award. 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 has edited Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain’s Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches and Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories. He also co-edited The Portable American Realism Reader. His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction, and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination.

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