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Overview

On view in the Terrell Main Library’s fourth-floor Special Collections and Archives from November 17, 2024 through December 20, 2024.

Oberlin College Libraries presents an exhibition commemorating the centenary of an American literary classic: Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1924). Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 highlights the “prose and poem concoction” left unfinished on Melville’s desk at his death in 1891. Posthumously published in 1924, Billy Budd is the story of a young “Handsome Sailor” impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars in the late 18th century, and later falsely accused of mutiny. The novella questions the morality of following the letter of the law and explores the fragility of human goodness.

Oberlin will host related free public programs, including a symposium and lunchtime workshops on knot tying and sustainable scrimshaw art, as well as a screening of the 1962 film on December 12 at 7:00pm. The Conservatory’s Opera Department will participate by performing arias from Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd.

The exhibition will also travel to The Grolier Club of New York City. Founded in 1884, the Grolier Club is America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and enthusiasts in the graphic arts. Oberlin College Libraries collaborated with The Grolier Club to produce an extensive online exhibition for Billy Budd at 100.

Go to Online Exhibition

Visit the exhibition's Related Links page for more information about all related events.

Exhibition Highlights

On view are extremely rare editions of Melville’s poetry, along with scholarly editions of the manuscript, as well as artistic adaptations for illustrated editions, theater, opera, and film. The works come from the collection of curator William Palmer Johnston, who summed up his approach, observing that “the challenging nature of Melville’s unfinished narrative compels us to join in the ongoing struggle to make sense out of the ambiguities and to find meaning in a world of fog and paradox.”

Poetry was Melville’s primary literary focus in the last decades of his life and the novella concludes with the classic poem “Billy in the Darbies,” which Robert Penn Warren declares as “certainly Melville’s most nearly perfect poem.” On view in the exhibition is the signed typescript of W. H. Auden’s 1939 poem “Herman Melville,” which includes the lines “And we are introduced to Goodness every day … He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect.”