BILLY BUDD SAILOR

    Penguin popular classics BILLY BUDD,SAILOR COMPLETE AND UNABRI The last great work of Melville's.H.M.S.Bellipotent.
When Billy,a handsome,unjpretentious,stuttering young able-seaman,is falsely accused of inciting mutiny,he lashes out,kills his accuser and is condemde to die.Written in allusive and beautiful prose,many-layered,resonant with ideans and meanings,Billy Budd has inspierd drama,films and opera and continues to elude interpretation.
The main theme of the novel,however is generally conidered to be the vulnerabillity of innocence in a fallen world.Billy,a victim of one man's unnatural hatred,is the embodiment of goodness destuoyed by evil,but as 'the criminap pays the penalty of his crime',a greater justice comes into play.
作者简介：
HERMAN MELVILLE（1819-91）.Ome of America's greatest autobrs.Melville is best remembered as the creator of Moby Dick,a novel since heralded as a tuiumph of nineteenth-centrury American fiction.
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819 to a family with both English and Durch ancestrty.The family was finacially and socially secure during Melville's child-hood but his father ,a cultivated gentleman,suffered from severe financial shortly after,insane from overwork and nervous collapse ,leaving his wife with einht children and very little money.Herman's education did not go much be-yond his fifteenth birthday and he had a numbetr of jobs:hank clerk ,salesman his brothe'r fur and cap store,farm-han and teacher,before joining a ship bound for Liverpool as a cabin boy in 1839.
Billy Budd,sailor is considered to be among the small masterpieces of American fiction.It is unique in its narrative method,profound in theme,and explores such controversial themes as the isolated self and the faillure of conventional wordly knowledge.this splendid short story is now believed to be his finest.

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (born Aug. 1, 1819, New York, N.Y., U.S.-died Sept. 28, 1891, New York City) U.S. writer. Born to a wealthy New York family that suffered great financial losses, Melville had little formal schooling and began a period of wanderings at sea in 1839. In 1841 he sailed on a whaler bound for the South Seas; the next year he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. His adventures in Polynesia were the basis of his successful first novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). After his allegorical fantasy Mardi (1849) failed, he quickly wrote Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), about the rough life of sailors. Moby-Dick (1851), his masterpiece, is both an intense whaling narrative and a symbolic examination of the problems and possibilities of American democracy; it brought him neither acclaim nor reward when published. Increasingly reclusive and despairing, he wrote Pierre (1852), which, intended as a piece of domestic “ladies” fiction, became a parody of that popular genre, Israel Potter (1855), The Confidence-Man (1857), and magazine stories, including “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) and “Benito Cereno” (1855). After 1857 he wrote verse. In 1866 a customs-inspector position finally brought him a secure income. He returned to prose for his last work, the novel Billy Budd, Foretopman, which remained unpublished until 1924. Neglected for much of his career, Melville came to be regarded by modern critics as one of the greatest American writers.