Sponsored by The Grolier Club
Join The Grolier Club for a livestreamed Symposium on Billy Budd in conjunction with Grolierite William Palmer Johnston’s exhibition, Melville’s Billy Budd at 100, running in the Club’s second-floor Gallery through November 9, 2024. The Club will host this symposium on Herman Melville and his novella Billy Budd in the ground-floor Exhibition Hall. Note: this is a live webcast.
The panel discussion among prominent Melvillians will address Melville’s unfinished masterpiece, each speaker commenting on the centennial exhibition and its implications from his own perspective. There will then follow a discussion on topics including textual history, biographical context during the years of writing the “prose and poem concoction,” the text’s cultural journey in the 20th and 21st centuries, and its adaptations into theater, opera, film and the visual arts, noting areas for future exploration. The moderator for the evening will be Richard Brodhead, who taught English and American literature at Yale for 32 years before becoming president of Duke University. Brodhead’s writings on Melville include Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel, The School of Hawthorne, and New Essays on Moby Dick. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and chaired the Academy’s 2013 commission on the humanities. The speakers will be John Bryant, David Greven, and Grolier members G. Thomas Tanselle and Henry Wessells.
Dr. Bryant, Professor Emeritus of English at Hofstra University, is a leading Melville scholar. Founding editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies and director of the Melville Electronic Library, he received the Distinguished Editor Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2015. He has contributed several books and numerous essays on Melville, American literature, and scholarly editing, including Melville and Repose (Oxford) and The Fluid Text (Michigan). He is currently working on the last volume of his three-volume biography, Herman Melville: A Half Known Life (Wiley). Dr. Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence (The University of Virginia Press, 2024) and a study of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Intimate Violence (Oxford University Press, 2017). Tom Tanselle, a Past President of the Grolier Club, is a bibliographical scholar who for many years was the vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. He was also one of the three primary editors of the fifteen-volume Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville, and he has published many other books. Henry Wessells is a writer and antiquarian bookseller in New York. He is author of A Conversation Larger than the Universe (2018), a catalogue accompanying his member’s exhibition of the same name, The Private Life of Books (2020), and A Melville Census, John Marr & Timoleon (forthcoming, 2025).
Melville’s Billy Budd at 100 commemorates the centenary of the posthumous and first publication of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1924), the story of a young “Handsome Sailor” impressed into the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars in the late 18th century, falsely accused of mutiny, and hanged after a drumhead trial for striking and killing his accuser. The exhibition highlights the composition, preservation, discovery, and ongoing transmission of a singular work of art – a “prose and poem concoction” – left unfinished on Melville’s desk at his death in 1891. Curated by Grolier Club member William Palmer Johnston from his extensive Melville Collection, the exhibition features more than 50 items, including multiple scholarly transcriptions of the Billy Budd manuscript, as well as illustrations, photographs, dust jackets, movie posters, the opera libretto, playbills, a commemorative stamp, unique fine bindings for limited editions, and artwork by Barry Moser. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue published by the Grolier Club.
Grolier Club Members
If you are a Grolier Club member, please register yourself and your guests via the Club website. Do not register via Eventbrite.