Billy Budd and Other Stories

Tales of compelling and mysterious power by one of America's greatest and most complex writers.

The works collected here were all written after Moby-Dick and Pierre. Stung by the critical reception and lack of commercial success of those two books, Melville became obsessed with the difficulties in communicating his vision to readers. This sense of isolation, of a need to find a way to express oneself, lies at the heart of these later works. "Billy Budd, Sailor," a classic confrontation between good and evil, is the story of an innocent young man unable to defend himself against a wrongful accusation. Billy's silence, his literal inability to express the truth, will ead to his death. The other selections here - "Bartleby," "The Encantadas," "Benito Cereno," and "The Piazza" - also deal, in varying guises, with the ways in which fictions are created and shared with a wider society.

Frederick Busch discusses in his introduction Melville's preoccupation with his "correspondence with the world," his quarrel with silence, and why fiction was, for Melville, "a matter of life and death." (back cover)