Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories

If Melville had never written “Moby Dick,” his place in world literature would be assured by his short tales. “Billy Budd, Sailor, ” his last work, is the masterpiece in which he delivers the final summation in his “quarrel with God.” It is a brilliant study of the tragic clash between social authority and individual freedom, human justice and abstract good. Melville also explores this theme in “Bartelby the Scrivener, ” his famous story about a Wall Street law clerk who takes passive resistance to a comic–and ultimately disastrous–extreme; and in “Benito Cereno, ” his dazzling account of oppression and rebellion on a nineteenth-century slave ship. Completing this collection of great tales are the eerie “The Encantados, ” the beautiful, romantic “The Piazza, ” and Melville’s chilling science fiction parable, “The Bell-Tower.”