Herman Melville

White-Jacket. NOVEL (1850) by Herman Melville

White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, usually referred to as White-Jacket, is an 1850 novel by Herman Melville. Based on Melville's experiences as a common seaman on the USS United States from 1843 to 1844 and stories that other sailors told him, the novel is severely critical of virtually every aspect of American naval life Pierre; or, The Ambiguities is a novel, the seventh book, by American writer Herman Melville, first published in New York in 1852. The plot, which uses many conventions of Gothic fiction, develops the psychological, sexual, and family tensions between Pierre Glendinning; his widowed mother; Glendinning Stanley, his cousin; Lucy Tartan, his fiancee; and Isabel Banford, who is revealed to be his half-sister. According to scholar Henry A. Murray,