Billy Budd and Other Tales (Signet Classics)

Author: Melville, Herman

Brand: Signet

Color: Teal/Turquoise green

Edition: Original

Binding: mass_market

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 384

Release Date: 02-06-2009

Part Number: 9780451530813

Details: Product Description


A master of the american short story

Included in this rich collection are:
The Piazza, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The Encantadas, The Bell-Tower, and
The Town-Ho's Story.


About the Author


Herman Melville was born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachussetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpiece
Moby-Dick.
Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.

EAN: 9780451530813

Package Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.3 x 1.2 inches

Languages: English