Billy Budd : and other prose pieces

About this book

“Billy Budd : and other prose pieces” is a book by Herman Melville in the “General & Other” category, written in English. It is in the public domain, so you can read it for free from the open source using the buttons above. If you enjoyed it, press Like to help others find it. Similar books are listed below.

About the author

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.