Herman Melville is best known as the author of Moby Dick, arguably the definitive American epic, but he also penned several significant works of shorter fiction. “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Melville’s first published short story, was published in 1853, two years after the publication of Moby Dick, and was followed by “Benito Cereno” in 1855. His celebrated novella Billy Budd, which remained unfinished at the time of Melville's death in 1891, was published posthumously and is now considered a classic. These three works, collected together in this one edition, remain popular among critics, scholars, teachers, and—to use Dr. Johnson’s famous term—“the common reader”. Collectively, alongside Moby Dick, they serve to prove and secure Melville's place as one of the greatest of all American authors.

Aaron Urbanczyk is a professor of English at Franciscan University of Steubenville. His teaching and research interests include American literature, comparative literature, literary theory, and a variety of canonical figures including Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and T. S. Eliot. His essays and reviews have appeared in Humanitas, Religion & the Arts, the St. Austin Review, Modern Age, Essays in Arts & Sciences, Papers on Language & Literature, the Journal for Cultural & Religious Theory, Perspectives in Religious Studies, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, The Catholic Thing, and the Ignatius Critical Editions of Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Joseph Pearce is the acclaimed author of numerous literary studies, including Literary Converts (Ignatius Press, 2006), The Quest for Shakespeare (Ignatius Press, 2008), and Shakespeare on Love (Ignatius Press, 2013), as well as popular biographies of Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He is the series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions.