"Melville, at his death in New York City in 1891, left on his desk various poetry and prose manuscripts and other material, including the manuscript leaves—“extensively revised, difficult to decipher, and sometimes internally inconsistent”—of what we now know as Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). It is the tale of a young “Handsome Sailor,” impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars of the late eighteenth century, falsely accused of mutiny, and hanged after an onboard drumhead trial, conducted by Captain Vere, for striking and killing his accuser, Master-at-Arms John Claggart. Through the story and its concluding poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” we join the author and his (sometimes omniscient and often seemingly detached) narrator, many decades after the events of the novella, in the “inside” search for what Robert Penn Warren refers to as the “truth hidden in Time.”"

from the Introduction by William Palmer Johnston