Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Billy Budd, Sailor

Billy Budd, Sailor

Melville, Herman

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 9378414702
ISBN13: 9789378414701
Publisher: Alpha Edition
Published: Oct 31 2026
Pages: 78
Weight: 0.26
Height: 0.19 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1797, when the British Navy remains alert to the threat of mutiny, innocence itself can become dangerous. Billy Budd, a handsome and popular young sailor, is impressed from merchant service into the rigid hierarchy of a seventy-four-gun warship, where discipline, surveillance and suspicion govern shipboard life. Open, illiterate and musical, he possesses a disabling stammer that leaves him vulnerable when speech matters most. Against Billy's natural candour stands John Claggart, the calculating Master-at-Arms whose concealed hostility places the young foretopman in peril. Their opposition drives a compact work of maritime fiction concerned not merely with conflict between men, but with the uneasy boundaries between innocence and malice, conscience and duty, natural justice and martial law. In a naval order shadowed by recent unrest, private judgement cannot easily be separated from institutional responsibility. An intrusive narrator repeatedly widens the drama beyond its immediate circumstances, bringing philosophical and theological questions into contact with specialised nautical detail. The demands of command, the limits of legal judgement and the problem of moral responsibility are examined without reducing them to simple answers. Shipboard hierarchy becomes the setting for a searching confrontation between innate goodness, concealed evil and a system compelled to preserve order. This book was out of print for decades and is now republished by Alpha Editions. It has been restored for today's and future generations. This edition is not just a reprint - it's a collector's item and a cultural treasure.

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