The Cruise of the Jasper B.

Clement J. Cleggett spends his days in a gray newspaper office, correcting typos in other people's words, until his irascible Uncle Tom dies and leaves him enough money to buy a ship. Not just any ship: the rundown, sea-worn Jasper B, which Cleggett somehow decides is his ticket to becoming a swashbuckling adventurer instead of the colorless copyreader he's been for eighteen years. What follows is a gloriously absurd education in seamanship, as Cleggett gathers a crew of misfits, confronts his imperious boss with a sudden backbone, and sets sail for adventure with more courage than sense. Don Marquis, the poet and humorist behind the archy and mehitabel stories, brings his sharp comic eye to this surprisingly tender tale of a man who refuses to be ordinary any longer. A comedy of transformation that captures the early twentieth-century American hunger to escape the desk and become legend.