IT is the centennial year of "Billy Budd, Sailor," Herman Melville's last book, a novella. Melville wrote it in the last five years of his life, but it was published posthumously only in 1924. It is considered a masterpiece second only to "Moby Dick." The Berkshire Historical Society, located in Arrowhead, Melville's farmstead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is pulling out all the stops in celebrating the book's centennial, with events and programs that started on September 20 with selections from the opera "Billy Budd, Sailor" by Benjamin Britten, along with readings from the novella, and will culminate on November 13 with a screening of the 1962 film "Billy Budd" directed by Peter Ustinov and starring Terence Stamp as Billy Budd.
Meanwhile, limited copies of a centennial edition of "Billy Budd Sailor With Fourteen Illustrations Cut in Wood" by American visual artist Barry Moser were published by Pennyroyal Press, Northampton, Massachusetts, 2024.
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