Classic Short StoriesSeafaring TalesBilly BuddSailorHerman MelvilleBilly Budd, Sailor is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, first published posthumously in London in 1924. Melville began writing the work in November 1888, but left it unfinished at his death in 1891. It was acclaimed by British critics as a masterpiece when published in London, and quickly took its place among the canon of significant works in the United States.The plot follows Billy Budd, a seaman impressed into service aboard HMS Indomitable in the year 1797, when the British Royal Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions. He is impressed from another ship, The Rights of Man (named after the book by Thomas Paine). As his former ship moves off, Budd shouts, "Good-by to you too, old Rights-of-Man."Billy, a foundling, has an openness and natural charisma that makes him popular with the crew. He arouses the antagonism of the ship's Master-at-arms, John Claggart. Claggart, while not unattractive, seemed somehow "defective or abnormal in the constitution," possessing a "natural depravity." Envy was Claggart's explicitly stated emotion toward Budd, foremost because of his "significant personal beauty," and also for his innocence and general popularity. (Melville further opines envy is "universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime.") This leads Claggart to falsely charge Billy with conspiracy to mutiny. When the Captain, the Hon. Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, is presented with Claggart's charges, he summons Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private meeting. Claggart makes his case and Billy, astounded, is unable to respond, due to a stutter which grows more severe with intense emotion. He strikes his accuser to the forehead and the blow is fatal.

Product Description: Pierre Glendinning is the nineteen-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother, Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford, who claims to be his half-sister, the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee...read more

“Jack Chase, the educated, manly friend in White Jacket, was an actual shipmate never to be forgotten. … Chase stayed in the heart, forever cherished, the only unwavering, beyond the family, friendship of Melville’s life. In White Jacket he is addressed: ‘Wherever you may now be rolling over the blue billows, dear Jack! take my best love along with you, and God bless you, wherever you go!’ The same sense of the beloved lost wanderer will forty years later illuminate the dedication to Billy Budd: ‘To Jack Chase, Englishman/Wherever that great heart may now be/Here on Earth or harbored in Paradise’.” --Elizabeth Hardwick, “Melville in Love,” The New York Review of Books, 2000. * “What startled me most about White-Jacket, though, is how contemporary his descriptions of sea life sound. Many of the Neversink crewmen will be instantly familiar to anyone who's served in modern U.S. Navy surface ships, the passage of time and advances in technology notwithstanding. … The contemporary feel to Melville's storytelling speaks volumes about why navies are the tradition-bound services they are. White-Jacket makes a great read, both for old salts indulging their nostalgia and for landlubbers who want to catch sight of life on the raging foam.” --James R. Holmes, The Diplomat, 2013.

Product Description: Presented as narratives of his own South Sea experiences, Melville's first two books had roused incredulity in many readers. Their disbelief, he declared, had been "the main inducement" in altering his plan for his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849)...read more

Product Description: "White Jacket" written by Herman Melville (best known for his classic whaling novel) was first published in 1850 and is considered to be a semi-biographical book, written from Melville's own personal experiences while returning home to the Atlantic Coast from the South Seas with the American Navy on a man-o'-war vessel...read more

Product Description: Herman Melville's "Israel Potter" is the Fictionalised tale of a man who really did fight in the American Revolution -- a man who lived a life of very real adventure. After fighting in the revolution, he went on to be a part of the newly-established United States Navy, ended up serving as a secret courier for Benjamin Franklin Bits of this are fiction, and may be even more spectacular...read more

Product Description: The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly in 1853-1855...read more

Product Description: "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! or, The Crowing of the Nobel Cock Beneventano" is an 1853 short story by the American writer Herman Melville. Like his later story, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" is one of Melville's experiments in utilizing sexually explicit metaphors, in an effort to challenge what Melville saw as a culture of sexual repression and the subjugation of women in contemporary Americ...read more

Product Description: "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" is a short story written by American writer Herman Melville (1819-1891). It first appeared in the April 1855 edition of Harper's Magazine.[1] A combination of two sketches, one set in the center of London's legal industry and the other in a New England paper factory, this story can be read as an early comment on globalization...read more

Product Description: In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War. Evoking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans...read more

Product Description: Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidele is the confidence man? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history...read more

Product Description: The classic Herman Melville story which begins,"I and my chimney, two grey-headed old smokers, reside in the country. We are, I may say, old settlers here; particularly my old chimney, which settles more and more every day."

Product Description: Herman Melville[a] (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period best known for Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851)...read more