‘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The text of matter hitherto unpublished has, so far as possible, been printed verbatim from Melville’s manuscript.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.