Billy Budd

In 1797, months after mutinies shook the British navy, the young sailor Billy Budd is taken from a merchant ship to serve on a warship. Everyone loves him for his beauty and innocence except the master-at-arms, John Claggart, who falsely accuses him of plotting mutiny. Billy, who stammers when upset, cannot answer in words and strikes Claggart dead, and Captain Vere must decide his fate.

Melville was still revising this short novel when he died in 1891, and it was not published until 1924. It is a moral puzzle about law, justice and conscience, and it became an opera by Benjamin Britten. Read it after Bartleby, the Scrivener for Melville's late, quieter style.

Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York to a family ruined when he was a boy. At twenty he went to sea, sailed on a whaler to the Pacific, deserted in the Marquesas Islands and turned the adventure into Typee, a bestseller that made him famous at twenty-seven.

His ambitions grew with each book, and Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was misunderstood and sold poorly. He spent nineteen years as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poems and the stories Bartleby, the Scrivener and Billy Budd, and died almost forgotten; he was rediscovered as a great writer in the 1920s.