Ship of Fools

Ship of Fools is a 1962 novel by Katherine Anne Porter, telling the tale of a group of disparate characters sailing from Mexico to Europe aboard a German passenger ship. The large cast of characters includes Germans, Mexicans, Americans, Spaniards, a group of Cuban medical students, a Swiss family, and a Swede. In steerage is a large group of Spanish workers being returned to Spain from Cuba. It is an allegory tracing the rise of Nazism and looks metaphorically at the progress of the world on its "voyage to eternity".