Billy Budd
by Herman Melville · first published 1900
7mentions
1recommended by
7HN commenters
2015–2025first – last mentioned
14% recommend71% neutral14% critical
TRIALS OF THE HANDSOME SAILOR Aboard the warship Bellipotent, the young orphan Billy Budd was called the Handsome Sailor. Billy was tall, athletic, noble looking; he was friendly, innocent, helpful and ever-cheerful. He was a fierce fighter and a loyal friend. All the men and officers liked him... All but one: Master-at-Arms Claggart. Envious, petty Claggart plotted to make Billy's life miserable. But when a fear of mutinies swept through the fleet, Claggart realized he could do more than just torment the Handsome Sailor... He could frame Billy Budd for treason...
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Moby-Dick really is a great book. If you want a dolphin-sized taste of Melville, try Billy Budd.
on “Short Little Difficult Books” ↗…wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other . ... thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg - a cosy, loving pair." While Moby Dick was slightly more subtle, Billy Budd and Melville's letters to Hawthorne and are even more heavily loaded with homoeroticism than Moby Dick. Homosexuality isn't a new thing.
on “Three Wise Men in a Bed: Bedsharing and Sexuality in Medieval Europe (2014)” ↗…it. Depends on your subject. The subject GRE for English lit, for example, is an incredible crapshoot: Much of it concerns passage identification, and if you happen to recognize that this one is from Billy Budd and this one is from Gulliver's Travels, great. If not, you can lose a lot of points in ways that are unlikely to reflect what lit profs are really judged by in the academic market: their ability to write…
on “Inside Graduate Admissions” ↗…ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity." -- Herman Melville, Billy Budd What I love about this quote is that violet and orange are so far apart in the rainbow.
on ““Autism is a spectrum” doesn’t mean what you think (2019)” ↗A Melville bio might be sobering. Melville's Moby Dick was so widely ignored (at best) that he quit writing prose for decades before starting Billy Budd a few years before his death. By that time, Moby was out-of-print ... it wasn't a 'work of genius' or a 'great American classic' for decades longer.
on “Ask HN: Books about people who persevered when no one else believed in them?” ↗Heh. There are some similarly funny passages in Billy Budd (which I had to read in high school. I did not enjoy it.)
on “Utopia Clicker” ↗In grade 9 I had to do a book report that compared two books by the same author and I chose Moby Dick and Billy Budd. My teacher tried to talk me out of it, but I insisted and ultimately she let me do it because Billy Budd is very a short novella. To this day, Moby Dick is still my second favorite book of all time…
on “Short Little Difficult Books” ↗