内容简介
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."
作者简介
Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819. When his
father died, he was forced to leave school and find work. After
passing through some minor clerical jobs, the eighteen-year-old
young man shipped out to sea, first on a short cargo trip, then, at
twenty-one, on a three-year South Sea whaling venture. From the
experiences accumulated on this voyage would come the material for
his early books, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), as
well as for such masterpieces as Moby-Dick (1851),
Pierre (1852), The Piazza Tales (1856) and Billy
Budd, Sailor (posthumous, 1924).
Though the first two novels—popular romantic adventures—sold well,
Melville's more serious writing failed to attract a large audience,
perhaps because it attacked the current philosophy of
transcendentalism and its espoused "self-reliance." (As he made
clear in the savagely comic The Confidence Man, 1857),
Melville thought very little of Emersonian philosophy. He spent his
later years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks,
writing only poems comprising Battle-Pieces (1866). He died
in 1891, leaving BILLY BUDD, Sailor, unpublished.