Billy Budd, Sailor (Art of the Novella) - Softcover

Herman Melville

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1612195857 ISBN 13: 9781612195858

Publisher: Melville House Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

In 1797 during the Napoleonic Wars, Lieutenant Ratcliffe of the H.M.S. Bellipotent is picking men for the ship's next expedition. Billy Budd is selected, and speaking to Billy's old shipmaster, Ratcliffe finds out that he was enormously admired on board his last ship and that the shipmaster considers him something of a peacemaker.

However, Ratcliffe has also a new master-at-arms for the voyage, a man named John Claggart, who it emerges is seemed somehow "defective or abnormal in the constitution," possessing a "natural depravity." He takes an instant dislike to simple and good-natured Billy Budd, until a final confrontation ends in tragedy.

One of Herman Melville's most admired works next to Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Sailor is a powerful tale of morality, duty, loyalty and forgiveness and a true classic of literature.

About this title

Review:

"The most studied and admired of Melville's works except for Moby-Dick." --John Updike
"[A] late-life masterpiece." --The New York Review of Books

About the Author:

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. At eighteen, he set sail on a whaler, and upon his return, wrote a series of bestselling adventure novels based on his travels, including Typee and Omoo, which made him famous. Starting with Moby-Dick in 1851, however, his increasingly complex and challenging work drew more and more negative criticism, until 1857 when, after his collection Piazza Tales (which included "Bartleby the Scrivener"), and the novel The Confidence Man, Melville stopped publishing fiction. He drifted into obscurity, writing poetry and working for the Customs House in New York City, until his death in 1891.

About this edition

• Publisher: Melville House Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1612195857
• ISBN 13: 9781612195858
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128