Notes on Melville's "Billy Budd" and "Typee"

Forty years separate the writing of these books, and Melville's moral concerns are highly visible in Billy Budd, in which a young sailor willingly accepts his punishment after accidentally killing an evil man. In Typee, Melville romanticized his own adventures as a merchant seaman on a Polynesian island. Typee is generally considered nothing more than adventure and travel writing, whereas Billy Budd is open to interpretation and is considered a much more literary work.