White Jacket

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 humour (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 exposé 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 delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades.

The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work.

We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.