"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 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. It addresses some of the fundamental questions of experience that every age must re-examine 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 one of the greatest American story writers of his age. Tales included are: "Bartleby the Scrivener"; "Benito Cereno"; "The Encantadas"; "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids".
