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Billy Budd is a novella begun around 1886 by American author Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891 and not published for the first time until 1924. The work has been central to Melville scholarship since it was discovered in manuscript among Melville's papers in 1924 and published the same year.

It has an ignominious editorial history, as poor transcription and misinterpretation of Melville's notes on the manuscript marred the first published editions of the text. For example, early versions gave the book's title as Billy Budd, Foretopman, while it now seems clear Melville intended Billy Budd, Sailor: (An Inside Narrative); some versions wrongly included a chapter that Melville had excised as a preface (the correct text has no preface); some versions fail to correct the name of the ship to Bellipotent (from the Latin bella war and potens power), from Indomitable, as Melville called her in an earlier draft.

In 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. established what is now considered the correct text; it was published by the University of Chicago Press, and most editions printed since then follow the Hayford/Sealts text. One of the most influential twentieth-century versions of the story was the libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier for the 1951 opera Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten, which unfortunately follows the earlier text as prepared for publication by Raymond Weaver.

Plot summary
The plot follows Billy Budd, a seaman willfully impressed into service aboard the HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the Royal Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by the Revolutionary French Republic's military ambitions. Billy, an orphaned illegitimate child suffused with innocence, openness, and natural charisma, is adored by the crew, but for unexplained reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship's Master-at-Arms, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. When Claggart brings his charges to the Captain, the Hon. Edward Fairfax "Starry" Vere, Vere summons both Claggart and Billy to his cabin for a private confrontation. When, in Billy's and Vere's presence, Claggart makes his false charges, Billy is unable to find the words to respond, due to a speech impediment. Unable to express himself verbally, he lashes out seemingly involuntarily at Claggart, killing him with a single blow. Vere, an eminently thoughtful man whose name recalls the Latin words "veritas" (truth) and "vir" (man) as well as the English word "veer," then convenes a drumhead court-martial. He acts as convening authority, prosecutor, defense counsel, and sole witness (except for Billy himself). He then intervenes in the deliberations of the court-martial panel to argue them into convicting Billy, despite their and his belief in Billy's innocence before God. (As Vere says in the moments following Claggart's death, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!") Vere claims to be following the letter of the Mutiny Act and the Articles of War, but recent scholarship suggests otherwise. At his insistence, the court-martial convicts Billy; Vere argues that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir the already-turbulent waters of mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged from the ship's yardarm at dawn the morning after the killing, Billy's final words are, "God bless Captain Vere!"

The story may have been based on events onboard USS Somers, an American naval vessel; one of the defendants in the later investigation was a distant relative of Melville..