Herman Melville

White Jacket Herman Melville

One of Melville's most popular novels, White-Jacket is both a brisk sea adventure and a powerful social critique, which also contains some of Melville's best black humor (particularly the hilarious Surgeon of the Fleet episode). In 1843, after three years of voyaging in the South Seas, Melville signed up as an ordinary seaman on the man-of-war United States, and headed for home. What he observed on that trip formed the basis of White-Jacket, a success both as a story and as an expose of certain naval practices of which the public was only dimly aware. Because the publisher Harper & Bros. made sure the book got into the hands of every member of Congress, White-Jacket was instrumental in abolishing flogging in the U. S. Navy forever. We are happy to announce this classic book. Many of the books in our collection have not been published for decades and are therefore not broadly available to the readers. Our goal is to access the very large literary repository of general public books. The main contents of our entire classical books are the original works. To ensure high quality products, all the titles are chosen carefully by our staff. We hope you enjoy this classic.