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Introduction

Billy Budd is a novella begun around 1886 by American author Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891 and not published until 1924. The work has been central to Melville scholarship since it was discovered in manuscript form among Melville's papers in 1924 and published the same year.

It has an ignominious editorial history, as poor transcription and misinterpretation of Melville's notes on the manuscript marred the first published editions of the text. For example, early versions gave the book's title as Billy Budd, Foretopman, while it now seems clear Melville intended Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative); some versions wrongly included a chapter that Melville had excised as a preface (the correct text has no preface); some versions fail to correct the name of the ship to Bellipotent (from the Latin bella war and potens powerful), from Indomitable, as Melville called her in an earlier draft.

In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. established what is now considered the correct text; it was published by the University of Chicago Press, and most editions printed since then follow the Hayford/Sealts text. Its adaptations include a black-and-white film adaptation (1962), as well as three made-for-television adaptations (1955, 1988, 1998). However, the best-known adaptation is the opera, Billy Budd with a score by Benjamin Britten and a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, which follows the earlier text as prepared for publication by Raymond Weaver in 1924. The opera has become a regular production at the Metropolitan Opera house in New York City and is generally well-known. Britten's distinct style has given the opera a unique perspective on the book, and the opera takes many creative liberties on the original book's plot.