Lenox enters the narrative as a place of attempted retreat that becomes a setting for literary encounter. Nathaniel Hawthorne moved there after the success of The Scarlet Letter, hoping to escape the clamour of fame and work on The House of the Seven Gables. The countryside offered a calm freshwater lake and distance from public life, but not lasting solitude: within a month of meeting Herman Melville, Hawthorne had invited him to visit, and the two men’s friendship would take shape through visits, long conversations, and letters. Lenox thus stands between withdrawal and connection, a rural refuge whose nearness to other people made sustained companionship possible.

Hawthorne’s Rural Retreat

Hawthorne’s move to Lenox followed a period of public success. Rather than remain amid the attention brought by The Scarlet Letter, he settled near a calm freshwater lake and turned toward his next book, The House of the Seven Gables. The quiet was an aspiration, not a sealed condition. Even in the country, Hawthorne could not avoid society, and a gathering organized by the New York lawyer David Dudley Field drew him into the company of literary figures, including Melville.

That picnic, on 5 August, set out for Monument Mountain. A sudden shower sent the party beneath a rocky ledge before the climb to the summit was complete; there, they drank champagne from a silver mug. When the sun returned, they continued upward. Melville clambered across a projecting rock as if it were a ship’s bowsprit, mimed hauling rigging, and pretended to harpoon a pond shaped like a whale in the valley below. The incident belongs to the country around Lenox as much as to the town itself: its landscape gave Melville’s maritime imagination a stage, while the picnic brought that performance before Hawthorne and the other guests.

Proximity and Friendship

A month after the mountain meeting, Melville moved to Arrowhead, a farm two miles south of Pittsfield, bought with help from his wealthy father-in-law. The distance between the two homes was short enough to sustain visits: Hawthorne’s house in Lenox was less than an hour’s ride away. Melville divided his days between farm work and writing, while the nearby road allowed the new friendship to develop through repeated contact rather than remain a single encounter. Hawthorne told a friend that he liked Melville so much he had asked him to stay for several days.

Their connection also travelled by letter. Melville reviewed Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse under the assumed identity of a Virginian spending July in Vermont. In that disguised review, he described Hawthorne’s writing as having planted seeds in his soul and deepened as he contemplated it. The language reveals the force of Hawthorne’s influence while the assumed persona conceals the reviewer’s identity. Lenox was therefore not simply where two writers lived near one another: it was part of the geography through which admiration, literary exchange, and personal attachment grew.

Visits made the local landscape a route into each other’s company. When Hawthorne’s wife and daughters were away visiting relatives, leaving him at home with five-year-old Julian and the boy’s pet rabbit, Melville arrived with Evert and George Duyckinck, his dog, and a picnic in a barouche and pair. Hawthorne supplied champagne, and the group went to the Shaker village at Hancock. The excursion joined the sociability of a country visit to a difference in outlook: Hawthorne regarded the Shakers’ shared sleeping arrangements and celibacy with disgust, while the text suggests that Ishmael and Queequeg might have interpreted that closeness differently.

Back in the Hawthornes’ parlour, the men smoked cigars that were normally forbidden in the house and talked late into the night about time, eternity, and matters both possible and impossible. The conversations were intimate, but not evidence of complete agreement. On slavery, Hawthorne expressed little sympathy for its victims and compared their situation unfavourably with that of labouring white people. The disagreement marks a limit within the friendship: Melville’s strong attachment to Hawthorne did not mean that Hawthorne could meet every need or share every conviction.

The Little Red Inn and Moby-Dick

Lenox’s most concentrated literary moment came on 14 November 1851, late in the afternoon, at the Little Red Inn. The weather was dreary, with snow and wind. Melville had hired a private room for a publication gathering for Moby-Dick, but only one guest was present. That guest was Hawthorne, to whom Melville gave the finished copy of the book.

The handover was brief, but the narrative gives it the weight of a life’s work. As the volume passed from Melville’s hands into Hawthorne’s, the effort and energy that had gone into the book seemed distilled into the exchange. The setting matters: after the visits, letters, shared journeys, and long parlour conversations, the inn room turns their friendship into a specific act of literary recognition. Lenox is where Hawthorne’s hoped-for seclusion repeatedly opened into company, and where Melville placed the completed book before the friend whose presence had come to matter so deeply to him.