Set in the mid-19th century on New York City's Wall Street, it was also, perhaps, Herman Melville's most prescient story: what if a young man caught up in the rat race of commerce finally just said, "I would prefer not to"?The tale is one of the final works of fiction published by Melville before, slipping into despair over the continuing critical dismissal of his work after Moby-Dick, he abandoned publishing fiction. The work is presented here exactly as it was originally published in Putnam's magazine—to, sadly, critical disdain.

    There are the usual inline tables of contents and links after each text/chapter to get back to the respective tables. The dates of first publication are noted.-------------Typee: A Romance of the South Seas. (1846)Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas. (1847)Mardi: and A Voyage Thither. (1849)Redburn: His First Voyage. (1849)White-Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War. (1850)Moby-Dick: or, The Whale. (1851)Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. (1852)Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. (1855)The Piazza Tales (1856): The Piazza, Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning-Rod Man, The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles, The Bell-TowerThe Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. (1857)Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. (1866)Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. (1876)John Marr and Other Sailors with Some Sea Pieces. (1888)Timoleon and Other Ventures in Verse. (1891)The Apple-Tree Table, and Other Sketches (1922): The Apple-Tree Table, Jimmy Rose, I and my Chimney, The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!, The Fiddler, Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs, The Happy Failure, The ’Gees.Billy Budd, and Other Prose Pieces (1924): Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), The Two Temples, Daniel Orme.Weeds and Wildings, With a Rose or Two. (1924)Essays: Fragments from a Writing Desk No. 1 & 2, Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, Authentic Anecdotes of “Old Zack,” Mr Parkman’s Tour, Cooper’s New Novel, A Thought on Book-Binding, Hawthorne and His Mosses.Uncollected Poems: Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry, Naples in the Time of Bomba, Immolated, Madam Mirror, The Wise Virgins to Madam Mirror, The New Ancient of Days, The Rusty Man, Thy Aim, Thy Aim?, The Old Shipmaster and his Crazy Barn, Camoens, Camoens in the Hospital, Montaigne and his Kitten, Falstaffs Lament over Prince Hal, Shadow at the Feast, Merry Ditty of the Sad Man, Honor, Fruit and Flower Painter, The Medallion, Time’s Long Ago!, In the Hall of Marbles, Gold in the Mountain, In Shards the Sylvan Vases Lie, In the Jovial Age of Old, A Spirit Appeared to Me, Give Me the Nerve, My Jacket Old, In the Old Farm-House, To ——, A Battle Picture, Old Age in his Ailing, Hearts-of-Gold, Pontoosuce, Epistle to Daniel Shepherd, Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh, The Admiral of the White, To Tom, Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-Temple in Arcadia, Puzzlement, The Continents, The Dust-Layers, A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855, A Reasonable Constitution, Rammon, Ditty of Aristippus, In A Nutshell, Adieu.

    In a story like Bartleby, the Scrivener -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In Benito Cereno, he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.