Herman Melville, the author of Billy Budd, Sailor, is a widely-read author today. However, when Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick, was published in 1851, it was lambasted by critics and quickly forgotten by readers. Moby Dick, now a famous American novel, was a radical departure for Melville, whose previous novels, Typee and Oomo, were successes as traditional adventure stories. Melville had experience as a sailor in the US Navy, and his adventure stories were enjoyable, if not ambitious.

Moby Dick revealed Melville’s weighty thematic obsessions, which had more depth than swashbuckling stories about sailors in danger. His interest in fatalism, nihilism, Gnosticism, allegory, philosophy, religion, and more were on full display, which led to the decline of his reputation and output. Casual readers sometimes did not want to read lengthy passages about rigorous topics.

Melville began writing Billy Budd in the final stretch of his life. He spent several years working on the novella, originally a poem. Melville had written poetry for three decades before returning to prose with Billy Budd. The composition process was chaotic, unfolding in bursts of activity across several documents and drafts, even though the novella would be comparatively short.