Hawthorne and His Mosses

[1] Melville met the author Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic and an ensuing hike up Monument Mountain in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts on August 5, 1850.

The review drew attention to his "great power of blackness" that "derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free."

Scholar David Dowling suggests that Melville intended the essay to redefine the expectations of readers of American prose to prepare them for Moby-Dick.

[7] The critic Walter Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".

[8] The New York Public Library's collection of the Duyckink Family Papers [9] retains Melville's fair-copy, that is, the handwritten version made by his wife, Elizabeth, that was submitted to Literary World.