White Jacket by Herman Melville, Fiction, Classics, Sea Stories

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 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."

Melville's (best known for his classic whaling novel) White Jacket was first published in 1850 an...