On the final day of 1885, sixty-six-year-old Herman Melville retired from his job as an inspector at the New York Custom House, where he’d toiled for twenty years while each of the nine novels he’d written between 1846 and 1857—including
Moby-Dick—went out of print. According to his wife Elizabeth, he was exhausted and susceptible to gloom but had a great deal of unfinished work on his writing desk—a healthy distraction that would “prevent time from hanging heavy on his hands” (Parker 29).
That work included poetry and fragments of stories about his youthful adventures at sea more than four decades earlier. Restless and ruminating, Melville had been quietly wondering about the lives of his shipmates from the trader St. Lawrence, the whalers Acushnet and Lucy Ann, and the
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Citation: Chura, Patrick. "Billy Budd". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 December 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6308, accessed 20 April 2025.]
