Billy Budd Sailor and Selected Tales — Herman Melville

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges So wrote Melville of Billy Budd Sailor among the greatest of his works and in its richness and ambiguity among the most problematic As the critic E L Grant Watson writes In this short history of the impressment and hanging of a handsome sailor boy are to be discovered problems as profound as those which puzzle us in the pages of the Gospels Outwardly a compelling narrative of events aboard a British man of war during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars Billy Budd Sailor is a nautical recasting of the Fall a parable of good and evil a meditation on justice and political governance and a searching portrait of three extraordinary men The passion it has aroused in its readers over the years is a measure of how deeply it addresses some of the fundamental questions of experience that every age must reexamine for itself The selection in this volume represents the best of Melvilles shorter fiction and uses the most authoritative texts The eight shorter tales included here were composed during Melvilles years as a magazine writer in the mid 1850s and establish him along with Hawthorne and Poe as the greatest American story writer of his age Several of the tales Bartleby the Scrivener Benito Cereno The Encantadas The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids are acknowledged masterpieces of their genres All show Melville a master of irony point of view and tone whose fables ripple out in nearly endless circles of meaning

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges So wrote Melville of Billy Budd Sailor among the greatest of his works and in its richness and ambiguity among the most problematic As the critic E L Grant Watson writes In this short history of the impressment and hanging of a handsome sailor boy are to be discovered problems as profound as those which puzzle us in the pages of the Gospels Outwardly a compelling narrative of events aboard a British man of war during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars Billy Budd Sailor is a nautical recasting of the Fall a parable of good and evil a meditation on justice and political governance and a searching portrait of three extraordinary men The passion it has aroused in its readers over the years is a measure of how deeply it addresses some of the fundamental questions of experience that every age must reexamine for itself The selection in this volume represents the best of Melville s shorter fiction and uses the most authoritative texts The eight shorter tales included here were composed during Melville s years as a magazine writer in the mid 1850 s and establish him along with Hawthorne and Poe as the greatest American story writer of his age Several of the tales Bartleby the Scrivener Benito Cereno The Encantadas The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids are acknowledged masterpieces of their genres All show Melville a master of irony point of view and tone whose fables ripple out in nearly endless circles of meaning