Billy Budd, Sailor is a sea adventure classic and the final novel by American writer Herman Melville, first published posthumously in London in 1924 as edited by Raymond M. Weaver, a professor at Columbia University. Other versions were later published. Melville had begun writing the original work in November 1888, but left it unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by British critics as a masterpiece when published in London, it quickly took its place as a classic literary work in the United States. The novella was ...
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Billy Budd, Sailor is a sea adventure classic and the final novel by American writer Herman Melville, first published posthumously in London in 1924 as edited by Raymond M. Weaver, a professor at Columbia University. Other versions were later published. Melville had begun writing the original work in November 1888, but left it unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by British critics as a masterpiece when published in London, it quickly took its place as a classic literary work in the United States. The novella was discovered in manuscript form in 1919 by Weaver, who was studying Melville's papers as his first biographer.[1] Melville's widow had begun to edit the manuscript, but had not been able to decide her husband's intentions at several key points or even to see his intended title. Poor transcription and misinterpretation of Melville's notes marred the first published versions of the text. After several years of study, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. published what was considered the best transcription and critical reading text in 1962. In 2017, the Northwestern University Press published a "new reading text" based on a "corrected version" of the genetic text prepared by G. Thomas Tanselle. [2] The novella was adapted as a stage play in 1951 and produced on Broadway, where it won the Donaldson Awards and Outer Critics Circle Awards for best play. Benjamin Britten adapted it as an opera by the same name, first performed in December 1951. The play was adapted into a film in 1962, produced, directed, co-written, and starring Peter Ustinov with Terence Stamp receiving an Academy Award nomination in his film debut. Created slowly over the last five years of his life, the novella Billy Budd represents Melville's return to prose fiction after three decades when he wrote only poetry. He started it as a poem, a ballad entitled "Billy in the Darbies," which he intended to include in his book, John Marr and Other Sailors. Melville composed a short, prose head-note to introduce the speaker and set the scene. The character of "Billy" in this early version was an older man condemned for inciting mutiny and apparently guilty as charged. He did not include the poem in his published book. Melville incorporated the ballad and expanded the head-note sketch into a story that eventually reached 150 manuscript pages. This was the first of what were to be three major expansions, each related to one of the principal characters. Melville had a difficult time writing, describing his process with Moby-Dick as follows: "Taking a book off the brain is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel-you have to scrape off the whole business in order to get at it with safety."[4] The "scrapings" of Billy Budd lie in the 351 leaves of manuscript now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The state of this manuscript has been described as "chaotic," with a bewildering array of corrections, cancellations, cut and pasted leaves, annotations inscribed by several hands, and with at least two different attempts made at a fair copy. The composition proceeded in three general phases, as shown by the Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., who did an extensive study of the original papers from 1953 to 1962.
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Add this copy of Billy Budd to cart. $1.99, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2014 by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.
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