Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was the established novelist whose friendship with Herman Melville became a decisive influence on the younger writer’s conception of Moby Dick. Their meeting in the Berkshires in 1850 brought together two men from seafaring families but with sharply different lives and temperaments. Hawthorne’s work had already captivated Melville; their growing intimacy gave Melville a reader whose understanding helped him recognize possibilities in his own book that he had not first intended.

Background and Temperament

At forty-six, Hawthorne was already America’s most famous writer. His family history linked him to the sea: his father, a sea captain, died of fever in Surinam when Hawthorne was four, and Hawthorne grew up with his mother and two sisters. His education and adult life, however, were largely land-bound. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine and later lived in Salem, where he spent twelve years secluded in an attic, emerging at night to walk the streets. He described himself as having made a captive of himself, unable to find the key to leave his self-imposed confinement.

That history offers a telling contrast with Melville’s. The sea had been Melville’s practical education; Hawthorne’s formation came through college, solitary study, and the interior world of his writing. Their shared connection to seafaring families did not erase the difference between them, but it gave their encounter a point of recognition. The account presents Hawthorne as a private, inward figure whose imaginative authority nonetheless reached Melville with unusual force.

Meeting Melville in the Berkshires

In the summer of 1850, Hawthorne was living near Pittsfield, drawn to the Berkshire landscape. Melville was staying with his aunt in the area when he read Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse. Its evocation of old New England captivated him. Their meeting, set apart from the heat and bustle of New York, became an epiphany in the account of Melville’s life: Hawthorne was not simply a writer Melville admired, but a presence who would change the course of his work.

Melville made his response public only indirectly. He reviewed Mosses from an Old Manse under the disguise of a Virginian spending July in Vermont, writing with language the book’s narrator describes as strikingly suggestive. The review figures Hawthorne’s influence as seeds taking root in Melville’s soul, deepening as he contemplated the older writer. The concealment of the reviewer’s identity sits beside the intensity of the praise: Melville masked the declaration even as he made it unusually intimate.

Their connection developed through meetings and increasingly long letters. Hawthorne invited Melville to visit, and their friendship extended into shared excursions as well as literary exchange. On one visit, Melville arrived by barouche with companions, a dog, and a picnic; Hawthorne supplied champagne, and the party travelled to the Shaker village at Hancock. Hawthorne judged the Shakers’ celibate communal life harshly, objecting to the narrow beds in which two people slept and describing the arrangement as a distasteful closeness between men. The episode records a difference in response to communal intimacy, even as the visit itself shows the ease and sociability their friendship had acquired.

Hawthorne and the Making of Moby Dick

Hawthorne’s influence intersected with a change in Melville’s ambitions. Melville had initially treated Moby Dick as a commercial venture, comparable to a whale ship setting out from New Bedford, and had described the material in deliberately dismissive terms. But as his imagination gathered power around the white whale, the book grew beyond the uncomplicated commercial project he had first envisaged. The account connects Hawthorne’s arrival in Melville’s life with this widening of the novel’s literary and metaphysical possibilities.

Hawthorne’s response to Moby Dick is described as one of literature’s great lost letters. Its contents cannot be recovered directly; the account reconstructs its significance from Melville’s reply. Melville wrote that Hawthorne’s having understood the book gave him a feeling of security, and described the work as wicked while feeling himself spotless. The force of the exchange lies not in a surviving critical verdict from Hawthorne, but in the effect Melville attributed to being understood by him.

The relationship also altered how Melville understood his own writing. Hawthorne opened his eyes to allegories and subtleties that, according to the account, he had not recognized in his work before. Melville’s response combined faith, love, arrogance, and blasphemy in an address that nearly accused his friend and mentor. Hawthorne thus occupies a distinctive place in the story of Moby Dick: not its author or its subject, but the reader whose recognition helped its author see the book’s deeper reach.