White Jacket by Herman Melville Fiction Classics Sea Stories

<p><strong>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. </strong>The symbolism of the color white introduced in this novel in the form of the narrator's jacket is more fully expanded upon in Moby-Dick where it becomes an all-encompassing blankness.</p><p>Melville's (best known for his classic whaling novel) White Jacket 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 . . .</p>