Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories
Edition: Bantam Classic Edition (2)
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 1982 March
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Number of pages: 278
ISBN-13: 9780553210941; 9780553210088
Copyright date: 1962
First sentence: I am a rather elderly man.
Description: If Melville had never written Moby Dick, his place in world literature would be assured by his short tales. "Billy Budd, Sailor," his last work, is the masterpiece in which he delivers the final summation in his "quarrel with God." It is a brilliant study of the tragic clash between social authority and individual freedom, human justice and abstract good. Melville also explores this theme in "Bartelby the Scrivener," his famous story about a Wall Street law clerk who takes passive resistance to a comic—and ultimately disastrous—extreme; and in "Benito Cereno," his dazzling account of oppression and rebellion on a nineteenth-century slave ship. Completing this collection of great tales are the eerie "The Encantados," the beautiful, romantic "The Piazza," and Melville's chilling science fiction parable, "The Bell-Tower."
(back cover)
Notes: ISBN on back cover is 0553210947.
ISBN on copyright page is 0553210084.
Table of contents: title: Billy Budd; title: The piazza; title: Bartleby; title: Benito Cereno; title: The Encantadas; title: The bell-tower