Billy Budd, Sailor

Author: Herman Melville
Publisher: Not available
Publish Date: 2004-12-01
Features: In December 1885, Herman Melville finally retired from his job at the New York Custom House. Unable to support himself through his writing, he had been working there for nineteen years as a customs inspector. He was sixty-six years old, and he had not written fiction in almost thirty years, though he had been writing and publishing poetry steadily. At some point during the following two years, he began to work on a poem that would eventually be called "Billy in the Darbies," about a mutinous sailor, shackled aboard ship, awaiting his execution. The poem was intended for inclusion in a volume of poetry to be called John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Melville wrote a prose headnote to accompany it. Then the story began to grow and change in Melville's imagination, and he turned to it, expanding the headnote into a novella that he would revise throughout the remaining years of his life.