书名：Billy Budd and Other Tales水手比利巴德及梅尔维尔中短篇小说集

作者：Herman Melville
出版社名称：Signet Classics
出版时间：2009
语种：英文
ISBN：9780451530813
商品尺寸：10.8 x 2.6 x 17.3 cm
包装：简装
页数：384 （以实物为准）
Billy Budd and Other Tales《水手比利巴德及梅尔维尔中短篇小说集》是美国作家赫尔曼·梅尔维尔的中短篇小说选集，收录了作者极具代表性的7部中短篇小说：The Piazza、Bartleby the Scrivener、Benito Cereno、The Lightning-Rod Man、The Encantadas、The Bell-Tower、The Town-Ho’s Story。这些作品反映了作者的思想倾向与艺术水准。文学评论家认为，梅尔维尔即使没有写出《白鲸》这部巨著，也能凭借他的中短篇小说而在世界文学中占有一席之地。

本书为Signet Classics推出的英文原版，由Julian Markels写导言，Joyce Carol Oates写后记，内容完整无删减，书本轻巧便携。
Included in this rich collection are:The Piazza,BartlebytheScrivener,BenitoCereno,TheLightning-RodMan,TheEncantadas,TheBell-Tower, andTheTown-Ho’sStory.

Bartleby the Scrivener
Benito Cereno
The Lightning-Rod Man
The Encantadas
The Bell-Tower
The Town-Ho’s Story

Herman Melvillewas born in August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Only twelve when his father died bankrupt, young Herman tried work as a bank clerk, as a cabin-boy on a trip to Liverpool, and as an elementary schoolteacher, before shipping in January 1841 on the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he made his way to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as ordinary seaman on the frigate United States to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures won him immediate success. By 1850 he was married, had acquired a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where he was the impetuous friend and neighbor of Nathaniel Hawthorne), and was hard at work on his masterpieceMoby-Dick.
Literary success soon faded; his complexity increasingly alienated readers. After a visit to the Holy Land in January 1857, he turned from writing prose fiction to poetry. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where from 1866-1885 he was a deputy inspector in the Custom House, and where, in 1891, he died. A draft of a final prose work,Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and uncollated, packed tidily away by his widow, where it remained until its rediscovery and publication in 1924.
In the time before steamships, or then more frequently than now, a stroller along the docks of any considerable seaport would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed marines, man-of-war’s men or merchant sailors in holiday attire ashore on liberty. In certain instances they would flank, or, like a bodyguard, quite surround some superior figure of their own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation. That signal object was the “Handsome Sailor” of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies. With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates. A somewhat remarkable instance recurs to me. in Liverpool, now half a century ago, I saw under the shadow of the great dingy street-wall of Prince’s Dock (an obstruction long since removed) a common sailor, so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham. A symmetric figure much above the average height. The two ends of a gay silk handkerchief thrown loose about the neck danced upon the displayed ebony of his chest; in his ears were big hoops of gold, and a Scotch Highland bonnet with a tartan band set off his shapely head.