front cover of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)
Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)
Herman Melville, Illustrated by Barry Moser
University of Chicago Press, 2025

An illustrated edition of Billy Budd featuring woodcuts by celebrated artist Barry Moser.
 
This edition of Billy Budd, Sailor presents Herman Melville’s iconic tale of the high seas alongside illustrations by renowned artist, publisher, and printmaker Barry Moser.
 
Throughout his fifty-year career, Moser has illustrated more than three hundred books ranging from novels to children’s stories to the Bible. Through his Pennyroyal Press, Moser designs and prints fine-press, illustrated, and occasionally oversized books in very limited editions, which are beloved by collectors and bibliophiles. To coincide with the centenary of the novella’s posthumous publication, Moser created sixteen original woodcuts illustrating the scenes and characters of Billy Budd, Sailor, and this trade edition now makes these exquisite illustrations accessible to a wide audience.

This illustrated edition adapts the text of the critical edition of the novella prepared for the Melville Electronic Library by John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Ohge.

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front cover of Melville Biography
Melville Biography
An Inside Narrative
Hershel Parker
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative is Hershel Parker’s history of the writing of Melville biographies, enriched by a lifetime of intimate working partnerships with great Melville scholars of different generations and by the author’s experience of successive phases of literary criticism. Throughout this bold book, Hershel Parker champions archival-based biography and the all-but-lost art of embodying such scholarship in literary criticism. First is a mesmerizing autobiographical account of what went into creating the award-winning and comprehensive  Herman Melville: A Biography. Then Parker traces six decades of the “unholy war” waged against biographical scholarship, in which critics repeatedly imposed the theory of organic unity on Melville’s disrupted life—not just on his writings—while truncating his body of work and ignoring his study of art and aesthetics. In this connection, Parker celebrates discoveries made by “divine amateurs,” before throwing open his workshop to challenge ambitious readers with research projects. This is a book for Melville fans and Parker fans, as well as for readers, writers, and would-be writers of biography.

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