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- INTRODUCTORY NOTE
‘Billy Budd,’ the title-piece of this volume, is a novel finished by
Melville five months before his death in 1891, and never before
published. ‘Daniel Orme’ is a sketch ‘omitted from _Billy Budd_.’ The
fourth piece--‘The Two Temples’--was on May 12, 1854, refused by
_Putnam’s Monthly Magazine_ out of a fear of offending the religious
sensibilities of the congregation of Grace Church, New York. This volume
concludes with eight sketches surviving in manuscript, written, in all
probability, after Melville’s retirement in 1886, at the age of
sixty-seven, from his post as Inspector of Customs in New York City.
Except for his letters, journals, and the juvenile ‘Fragments from a
Writing Desk,’ this closes the count of Melville as a writer of prose.
The rest of the volume comprises all Melville’s contributions to
magazines that he acknowledged but never reprinted.
The text of matter hitherto unpublished has, so far as possible, been
printed verbatim from Melville’s manuscript. Here and there, however,
owing to the heavily corrected condition of many of the papers, slight
adjustments in the interests of grammar or of style have been made in
Melville’s wording.
The editor and publishers are indebted to the Princeton University Press
for their courtesy in allowing two of the essays included in this volume
to be reprinted from _The Apple-Tree Table and Other Sketches_, a volume
of Melville’s prose miscellanea recently issued from Princeton.
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- INTRODUCTORY NOTE