Which city is home to the New Bedford Whaling Museum's Moby-Dick Marathon?

The New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Moby-Dick Marathon takes place in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The event is an annual live, cover-to-cover reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, hosted at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Readers and visitors gather in the historic Massachusetts seaport, a fitting setting because New Bedford was one of the world’s major nineteenth-century whaling ports and is closely connected with the novel’s opening chapters.

The marathon is sometimes confused with Nantucket because Nantucket is another famous whaling center and appears prominently in Moby-Dick’s maritime world. The museum, however, is in New Bedford, not Nantucket, Salem, or Boston. The event also reflects Melville’s own connection to the city: in 1841 he sailed from New Bedford aboard the whaleship Acushnet, an experience that helped shape his later fiction.

The reading is more than a literary stunt. It combines performance, maritime history, scholarship, and community participation, turning a long novel into a shared annual tradition.