White Jacket by Herman Melville. 1850/1996. Softcover.

The mixture of journalism, history, and fiction; the presentation of a sequence of striking characters; the metaphor of a sailing ship as the world in miniature--all of these prefigure his next novel, Moby-Dick. The White Jacket written by Herman Melville (best known for his classic whaling novel) was first published in 1850 and is considered to be a semi-biographical book, written from Melville's own personal experiences while returning home to the Atlantic Coast from the South Seas with the American Navy on a man-o-war vessel. In the note preceding the novel, Melville states, "In the year 1843 I shipped as 'ordinary seaman' on board of a United States frigate then lying in a harbor of the Pacific Ocean. After remaining in this frigate for more than a year, I was discharged from the service . . ."