A sailor nicknamed for the makeshift white jacket he sews himself narrates a voyage home aboard a U.S. Navy frigate, cataloguing its floating world of flogging, rank, and shipboard justice.
Books mentioned in White-Jacket (4)
Peregrine Pickle by Tobias Smollett: “For this purpose, Peregrine Pickle is a good book; so is Gil Blas; so is Goldsmith.”
Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage: “For this purpose, Peregrine Pickle is a good book; so is Gil Blas; so is Goldsmith.”
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: “Before seeking an introduction to him through Lemsford, I had often marked his tall, spare, upright figure stalking like Don Quixote among the pigmies of the Afterguard, to which he belonged.”
Paradise Lost by John Milton: “For, after all, though Paradise Lost be a noble poem, and we men-of-war's men, no doubt, largely partake in the immortality of the immortals”