Delilah (CLASSICS OF NAVAL LITERATURE)
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About this book
Delilah is a sea story unlike any ever written although in reading itone isreminded of Ahab?s single-minded quest for the great white whale of Joseph Conrad and his men of the sea of the struggles of epic myth and the real battles that have become mythic within the imaginations of men. The novel is in all ways extraordinary. The story which occurs on the eve of the first World War is that of a U.S. Navy destroyer on detached duty in the South Seas and of the men who serve in her. In the tiny world of a destroyer in a vast universe of the sea the officers and men of Delilah carry out their orders heroically according to the code of the fighting man to patrol their assigned area to inspect remote islands to show the flag to carry out diplomatic missions and to prepare for the impending war. From thebeginning the men aboard Delilah face severe trials. A voracious eater of coal she must be fed constantly. A typhoon provides a test that all but the hardiest must fail. When the novel was first published in 1941 Sinclair Lewis noted that itwas more real than reality.? The New York Times called itan extraordinarily lovely novel of a fighting ship?; and Clifton Fadiman referred to itin the New Yorker as a mature work of imagination on a subject ordinarily left to writers of adventure yarns.?
