Typee and Billy Budd mark the productive beginning and the end of the foremost imaginative genius of nineteenth-century American fiction.

Melville came to live in Typee valley as a result of 'jumping his ship' in July 1842, on a whaling voyage to the South Seas. He gave as his excuse the tyranny of the captain and the weariness of the voyage, but he really had 'an irresistible curiosity to see those islands which the olden voyagers had so glowingly described He wanted in fact to see at first hand the existence of a society that had remained un- changed from its earliest known condition.

Billy Budd is one of the most re- markable short novels ever written. It is based upon a true series of events, when in 1797 the crews of some of the Royal Navy's men-of- war at Spithead and the Nore mutinied. Within this framework Melville created a story of powerful symbolism centred around the young sailor Billy Budd, whose pagan innocence leads him step by step to tragedy.
--front flap