Further Moby-Dick Reading and Resources

In conjunction with adding some quick links and a FAQ section to the r/mobydick sidebar, I thought it might be helpful to start a list of additional resources for readers who might want to dive deeper into the text, Melville's life, and other analysis to better understand the book. Please feel free to suggest other resources that you've found especially helpful and I'll be happy to add them.

Further Reading about Moby-Dick

• Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd Edition (ed. Hershel Parker, 2017)
• Why Read Moby-Dick? (Nathaniel Philbrick, 2010)
• Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) (Harold Bloom, 2007)
• Columbia Critical Guide: Moby-Dick (Nick Selby, 1999)
• Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick (George Catkin, 2012)
• Chasing the White Whale: The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today (David Dowling, 2010)
• Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick (Eds. John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw, Timothy Marr, 2010)
• All Visible Objects -- shameless plug for my own (free) Substack about Moby-Dick

Further Reading about Herman Melville

• Melville: His World and Work (Andrew Delbanco, 2006)
• Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1 (Hershel Parker, 1996)
• Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (John Bryant, 2021)
• Melville in Love: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick (Michael Shelden, 2017)
• Herman Melville's Whaling Years (Wilson Heflin, 2004)

Further Reading about Whales, Whaling, and Life at Sea

• In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (Nathaniel Philbrick, 2000)
• Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (Eric Jay Dolin, 2017)
• Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870 (Lisa Norling, 2000]
• Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (Richard J. King, 2019)

Art and Moby-Dick

• Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-century American Art (Elizabeth Schultz, 1995)
• Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page (Matt Kish, 2011)

YouTube lectures

• Hubert Dreyfus: Melville's Moby Dick (8h36m)
• Cyrus Patel: Moby-Dick (Part 2, 3, 4, 5, approx. 6 hours total)
• Nathaniel Philbrick: The Enduring Power of Moby-Dick (40m)

Other Resources:

• Melville’s Marginalia Online - "A virtual archive of books owned and borrowed by American author Herman Melville" with scans of his margin notes
• Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies -- a thrice-yearly journal of "scholarly articles, notes, reviews, and creative writing of a critical, theoretical, cultural, or historical nature" Melville's work (requires membership)