Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. 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. 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.

Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. The series has been recognized for its “excellence in design” by AIGA. The Art of the Novella Series celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners. Series Overview: Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers but beloved and practiced by literature’s greatest writers. One of the major works of American literature. As things escalate beyond the naive Billy’s control, tragedy looms on the horizon like Melville’s great white whale, and the story become Melville’s final, sublime plunge into the classic tussle between civilization and chaos, between oppression and freedom, as well as the book in which he discusses homosexuality most openly. In it, Melville returns to the sea to tell the story of Billy, a cheerful, hard working, and handsome young sailor, conscripted to work against his will on another ship, where he soon finds himself persecuted by Claggart, the paranoid master-at-arms. Herman Melville’s final masterpiece, found unpublished on his desk at his death.īilly Budd, Sailor would emerge, after its publication in 1924, as one of Melville’s best-loved books-and one of his most open, with its discussion of homosexualty.

Billy budd sailor