Herman Melville

A nineteenth-century appeal to maintain a decent standard of food for sailors, to care for the sick, and to prevent the frequency of flogging in the United States Navy.

Long considered the author's strangest novel, this work is a comic allegory aimed at the optimism and materialism of mid-18th-century America. A mysterious...

When Billy, a handsome, unpretentious, stuttering young able-seaman, is falsely accused of inciting mutiny, he lashes out, kills his accuser and is condemned to die....