Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories ~ Paperback ~ Herman Melville

Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body of short stories arguably unmatched in American fiction. In the sorrowful tragedy of Billy Budd,Sailor; the controlled rage of Benito Cereno; and the tantalizing enigma of Bartleby, the Scrivener; Melville reveals himself as a singular storyteller of tremendous range and compelling power. In these stories, Melville cuts to the heart of race, class, capitalism, and globalism in America, deftly navigating political and social issues that resonate as clearly in our time as they did in Melville's. Also including The Piazza Tales in full, this collection demonstrates why Melville stands not only among the greatest writers of the nineteenth century, but also as one of our greatest contemporaries. This Penguin Classics edition features the Reading Text of Billy Budd, Sailor, as edited from a genetic study of the manuscript by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., and the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry text of The Piazza Tales.Author BiographyHerman Melville (1819-1863) is one of America's greatest writers. During his lifetime, Melville published nine novels, a collection of tales, and four volumes of poetry, along with various uncollected tales, poems, and reviews. Peter Coviello (introduction and notes) is a professor of American literature and queer studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature and, most recently, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, which was a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Award in LGBT Studies.