6. Moby Dick or The Whale
Book
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, edited by Hershel Parker and
Harrison Hayford, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd Edition, 2002,
W.W. Norton & Company, ISBN: 0-393-97283-6
Program Description
First published in 1851, Moby Dick, or The Whale, was a
critical and commercial failure that effectively ended Herman Melville’s professional writing career. A century and a half later, Moby Dick ranks as one of the greatest works in the English language. Its three famous opening words, and the image of the one-legged Ahab in mad pursuit of the great White Whale, have risen to the level of cultural icons. This grand – and occasionally grandiose – novel unites the many voices of Herman Melville in an imperfect, mongrel mix of epic poetry, Shakespearean tragedy, encyclopedic cataloguing, biblical oratory – and not a small dose of comedy.
“I am half way in the work . . . It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get
oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; – and to cool the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as
the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.” – Herman Melville
Discussion Leader
Mark Cwik is a designer and builder of wood furniture. He
previously worked for the adult program of the Great Books Foundation and currently leads several discussion groups in the Chicago area. Moby Dick is his favourite book.
