Novel
Billy Budd, Sailor
Herman Melville · 1924
Synopsis
Summer 1797: the British fleet has barely emerged from the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. Billy Budd, a young sailor, a foundling, illiterate, handsome and loved by his comrades, is taken by force from a merchant ship and assigned to the foretop of a warship. The master-at-arms, John Claggart, courteous in appearance, hates him in secret, with a hatred that the narrative leaves mysterious. He accuses him before Captain Vere, who esteems the boy, of plotting a mutiny. Billy, who stammers whenever emotion seizes him, cannot find the words to defend himself.
Context
The text was begun in 1886, and its author was still working on it five months before his death, without finishing it. His widow tried to put the manuscript in order, without managing to learn what he had intended, not even for the title. The writer's first biographer, Raymond Weaver, found the leaves in a tin box kept by his granddaughter and published them in 1924, with errors of reading and a preface that the writer had withdrawn. The reference text was established only in 1962, and an edition of 2017 still differs from it.
Who it is for
A short, unfinished narrative. Several states of the text exist, successive editors having reconstructed differently a manuscript left in disorder.
Prizes and reception
Hailed as a masterpiece from its posthumous publication, it was adapted as an opera by Benjamin Britten in 1951, then for the screen by Peter Ustinov in 1962.
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