Sea Fever: The True Adventures That Inspired Our Greatest Maritime Authors, from Conrad to Masefield, Melville, and Hemingway

Taking its title from a John Masefield poem, Jefferson's study of how seafaring has influenced great American and English writers has moments of great charm but ultimately falls flat. Jefferson, a maritime historian, covers household names like Ernest Hemingway, who had a passion for big-game fishing; James Fenimore Cooper, whom Jefferson considers the first of the modern nautical novelists; and Herman Melville, whose experiences aboard a whaling ship found voice in his great masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Jefferson pinpoints 18th-century satirist Tobias Smollett as the first to write convincingly about the sea and ship life, after serving in the Royal Navy as a surgeon's mate. Other authors covered include Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Joseph Conrad. Jefferson writes in a winsome, casual, somewhat hyperbolic style, and clearly loves both the sea and his equally salty subjects, but that may not be enough to engage even those readers generally interested in the authors whose work he analyzes. Jefferson cheerfully confesses that he is not writing as a literary critic or a scholar, rather offering a mostly descriptive, occasionally speculative account of the convergence of seafaring and literature. His intense focus offers some revelations, but more often provokes a feeling that the big picture is being obscured by this microscopic approach. Illus. (May)