White Jacket
by Herman Melville
One of Melville's most popular novels, The White Jacket is both a vivid naval adventure and a powerful social critique that incorporates some of Melville's best black humor (a particularly hilarious chapter of The Surgeon of the Fleet). In 1843, after three years of sailing in the South Seas, Melville enlisted and went home as an ordinary sailor for a United States military man. What he observed during this voyage formed the basis of the White Jacket, success both as a story and as an exposure of some of the marine practices that the public only knew dimly about. Since publisher Harper & Bros. ensured that the book was in the hands of every member of Congress, the White Jacket played an important role in removing phlogs from the U.S. Navy forever.
