Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

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2006 Paperback Good A copy that has been read, but remains in clean condition. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (including dustcover, if applicable). The spine may ... show signs of wear. Pages can include limited notes and highlighting, and the copy can include "from the library of" labels. Read more Show Less

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2006 Trade paperback Fine. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 335 p. Contains: Illustrations. Barnes & Noble Classics (Paperback). Audience: General/trade.

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Trade Paperback FINE Trade Paperback-1593082533 [MELVILLE, HERMAN] BILLY BUDD AND THE PIAZZA TALES.

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More About This Book

Overview

Billy Budd and the Piazza Tales, by Herman Melville, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
  • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
  • Biographies of the authors
  • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
  • Footnotes and endnotes
  • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
  • Comments by other famous authors
  • Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
  • Bibliographies for further reading
  • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Largely neglected in his own lifetime, Herman Melville mastered not only the great American novel but also the short story and novella forms. In Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales, Melville reveals an uncanny awareness of the inscrutable nature of reality.

Published posthumously in 1924, Billy Budd is a masterpiece second only to Melville’s Moby-Dick. This complex short novel tells the story of “the handsome sailor” Billy who, provoked by a false charge, accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. Unable to defend himself due to a stammer, he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Although typically ambiguous, Billy Budd is seen by many as a testament to Melville’s ultimate reconciliation with the incongruities and injustices of life.

The Piazza Tales (1856) comprises six short stories, including the perpetually popular “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby,” a tale of a scrivener who repeatedly distills his mordant criticism of the workplace into the deceptively simple phrase “I would prefer not to.”

Robert G. O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for seventeen years; since 1999 he has been the director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and the principal writer of Seeing Jazz, the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on jazz painting and literature.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781593082536
  • Publisher: Barnes & Noble
  • Publication date: 4/1/2006
  • Pages: 384
  • Sales rank: 254,371
  • Series: Barnes & Noble Classics Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.19 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.96 (d)

Meet the Author

Herman Melville
Robert G. O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for seventeen years; since 1999 he has been the director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and the principal writer of Seeing Jazz, the catalog for the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit on jazz painting and literature.

Biography

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.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

    1. Date of Birth:
      August 1, 1819
    2. Place of Birth:
      New York, New York
    1. Date of Death:
      September 28, 1891
    2. Place of Death:
      New York, New York
    1. Education:
      Attended the Albany Academy in Albany, New York, until age 15

Read an Excerpt

From Robert G. O'Meally's Introduction to Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales

Bear in mind that while The Piazza Tales has been received as a classic in our time, in Melville’s own day he was correct; the book did not sell well. In a sad exchange of letters, Melville eventually turned down the publisher’s offer to purchase the metal plates used to print the book, in case he wanted them for possible future printings; but, alas, he could not afford them. Having no further use for the plates for The Piazza Tales, Harper had them melted down and sold as scrap metal.

For further perspective on The Piazza Tales, let us commence with Billy Budd, our volume’s first narrative. This is Melville’s last work of fiction, written, along with occasional poems, not with a clear sense of the market but for himself, left unfinished (brought to a sort of completion but clearly not as polished as he intended), and then not published until 1924, thirty-three years after the writer’s death. Here is a mighty tale, compressed in the manner of a Greek tragedy, tersely eloquent, and informed, as we shall see, by a strange comedy and by an even stranger murmurous sound that is close to the spirit of the blues.

Like so much of Melville’s writing, Billy Budd is shadowed by the presence of a powerful and beautiful black figure associated with freedom. In the novel’s second paragraph, the stage is set for the reader to meet the mythically handsome and mystically good sailor Billy (called by some “Baby”) Budd, with an invitation to consider a prior case of perfection in the shape of “a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham—a symmetric figure much above the average height.” Ear-ringed with large gold hoops and dressed in colorful silk, this black sailor, seen in Liverpool, was the uncontested leader of “such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race.” As the charismatic figure in black walked among the other sailors, exchanging pleasantries, his colleagues praised him, paused and stared at him, “they took that sort of pride . . . which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves.” This black man is like a figurehead to Melville’s ship of a novella; we glimpse him only as we board. But he shadows the text in the godlike figure of Billy Budd himself.

Billy is a leader not by virtue of official rank, treasury, or pedigree (like many mythic heroes he is uncertain of his family origins or true home) but through his personal excellence alone. Breathtakingly handsome, Billy is admired by his shipmates for his bubbling good cheer, for his love of doing good deeds, and when the situation demanded it, for his terrible swift fists. And like the black sailor in Liverpool—or any sailor on any ship within the scope of the British fleet (which sailed the world)—Billy Budd is subject to English “impressment,” the practice of boarding ships at sea and seizing men for service in the British navy. Thus taken from the ship called, significantly enough, the Rights-of-Man (so christened, we are informed, after Thomas Paine’s pamphlet in defense of the French Revolution), Billy has been “impressed” into service as a British seaman. According to his steady nature and fatalistic outlook, the seized man does not complain. “But, indeed,” as the tale’s narrator informs us, “any demur would have been as idle as the protest of a goldfinch popped into a cage.”

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