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Two Years Before the Mast:a Personal Narrative Of Life at Sea
[Paperback - 1981]
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Additional Category: General History - North American History
Publisher: Penguin Classics | ISBN: 9780140390087 | Pages: 576
Shipping Weight: .437 | Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.3 x 7.7 inches

In 1834, Richard Henry Dana Jr. left the comforts of Boston for the hardships and abuses of the most exploited segment of the American working class.  Dana’s account of his passage around Cape Horn to California, and back, is a remarkable portrait of the seagoing life: the day-to-day routines and conversations, the sailors who manned the ship, the brutality of incompetent officers, and the style of life in the newly emerging coastal towns of California. 

As Thomas Philbrick discusses in his introduction, the public’s sympathy for the plight of mariners, which was aroused by the book, eventually faded, but Two Years Before the Mast forever changed readers’ romanticized perceptions of life at sea and inaugurated a lasting tradition of realism and concern for human values.

John Seelye is a graduate research professor of American literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain at the Movies, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Literature, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Early Republic, Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, and War Games: Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism. He is also the consulting editor for Penguin Classics in American literature.

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