Life and works of Herman Melville
            Born in New York City in 1819 of a Unitarian father and a Calvinist mother of the Dutch Reformed church, Herman Melville enjoyed a childhood amid the comforts and security of a relatively well-to-do family. However, in 1832 the untimely death of his father, who had by then gone into bankruptcy, left the family subject to the munificence of kind relatives and the assistance of charitable friends. Although it is matter of biographical conjecture as to how large a part this early traumatic experience and the subsequent disappointing adolescence played in young Melville’s decision to ship before the mast as a seaman, it is a matter of critical and narrative record that his sea wonderings were creatively translated and expressed in much of his fiction. For example, just as Melville’s first voyage aboard the merchantship St. Lawrence, bound for Liverpool, provided much of the creative ground for Red burn (1849), his subsequent voyage on the Acushnet, a whaler out of new Bedford and bound for the South seas, gave Melville much in the way of romantic background for his novel Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847).
Melville is much more than a story-teller of adventure on the high seas and an exotic islands; his highly rewarding personal associations with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his careful and perceptive reading of Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne and Carlyle were instrumental in carrying him beyond romance to the soundings of his own inner depths. Questioning the circumstances of man cast loose from traditional religious, political and philosophical moorings and caught in the maze of human existence, Melville penetrated the masks of appearance and illusion and in the process wrote what is considered one of the major novels of all times, Moby Dick (1851).
Unfortunately for Melville, this shift from an emphasis on romantic adventure to an emphasis and metaphysics did not bring him commensurate financial and critical reward. Like so many artists who live out to their own time, he found that by not accommodating the popular tastes, which demanded less thought and more action, his audience dwindled. Although he attempted to return to his earlier mode of writing as evidenced by Israel Potter (1855), he could not produce the type of novel that had brought him his early acclaim. Apart from a collection of short stories published in 1856 and his novel The Confidence Man (1857), Melville wrote no further prose. A visit to the Holy land in 1857 inspired a long, involved poem concerned with his search for religious faith and a diary of his trip appeared as Journal up the Straits. By 1860 Melville’s great creative period was over and he tried to earn a living as a lecturer. He moved to New York City during the Civil War and three years later in 1866 was appointed a deputy inspector in the customer house. He continued in this post for nineteen years, many of them spent in complete obscurity. He died in 1891 leaving some unfinished manuscripts, amongst them his masterpiece, Billy Budd, Sailor, which were only discovered by chance in the 1920s when a renewed enthusiasm for Melville’s work re-evaluated his long obscured literary reputation.
Billy Budd, Sailor is considered to be among the small masterpieces of American fiction. It is unique in its narrative method, profound in theme, and explores such controversial theme as the isolated self and the failure of conventional worldly knowledge. This splendid short novel is now believed to be his finest that based upon a historical situation .The action deals with a handsome Sailor who has unjustly been accused, and, through a chain of circumstances, condemned to be executed. The Captain is aware of the innocence of the sailor (Billy Budd), but believes that, all things considered; the letter of the law must be implemented. Billy is hanged but his last words are blessing upon the Captain.

 In the light of the dawn, Billy’s soul is thought by some to have ascended to heaven. An echo of the event is preserved in the sailor’s songs, and the official account is oddly involuted in its expression.