Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories

by Melville, Herman; Busch, Frederick

• ISBN13: 9780140390537
• ISBN10: 0140390537
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1986-04-01
• Publisher: Penguin Classics

Summary

Seven stories deal with a slave rebellion, an obstinate copyist, an accidental murder, a voyage to the Galapagos Islands, and a bachelors' dinner party

Author Biography

Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping 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, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece Moby-Dick.

Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Bartleby	1	(46)
The Piazza	47	(20)
The Encantadas	67	(72)
The Bell-Tower	139	(20)
Benito Cereno	159	(100)
The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids	259	(28)
Billy Budd, Sailor	287