Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings. The Writings of Herman MelvilleóVolume 13.

Herman Melville.

Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings. The Writings of Herman MelvilleóVolume 13.

Edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall, Robert Sandberg, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Historical note by Hershel Parker. Evanston and Chicago:

Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,

2017

This is the final volume of the five-decades-long project to publish critical texts with notes and introductions of all the works of Melville, as well as his correspondence and journals. This fourth scholarly reading text of Billy Budd, Sailor is based on a corrected and modified version of the ìGenetic Textî prepared by Hayford and Sealts, published in 1962. This reading text employs slightly modified editorial principles, described in depth in the note by Tanselle, from those followed in 1962. Tanselle calls attention to a leaf on which Melville appended in pencil what may be taken as a coda to the entire narrative:
ìHere ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this [one undeciphered word] world of oursóInnocence and infamy, spiritual depravity and fair repute.î

From the Collection of William Palmer Johnston.