White-Jacket

White-Jacket is a classic novel written by Herman Melville and first published in 1850. One of Melville’s most popular novels during his lifetime and the subject of renewed interest in recent decades. White-Jacket is both a brisk sea adventure and a powerful social critique, which also contains some of Melville's best black humor. 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.