"Isle of the Cross" (c. 1853) is a possible unpublished and lost work by Herman Melville, which would have been his eighth book, coming after the commercial and critical failures of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852).
The publisher was possibly concerned about poor reviews of Pierre, or feared legal action from Agatha Hatch's family.
[5] Harrison Hayford in 1946 suggested that the confirmation in a newly found letter that Melville had completed a major project after the failure of Moby-Dick exposed "serious errors in the theory now generally held", that Melville "in despair and defiance at the reception of Moby-Dick had written Pierre with "no expectation that it would succeed with the public", and expected that it would be his last book.
Richard H. Brodhead, then of Yale University, writing in the New York Times of June 23, 2002, labelled Parker's "surmise" as "dubious," and Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, wrote in The New Republic, that Parker "trusts his own intuition" and presents "inferences as facts," for "such a book was never published – and it is a surmise that Melville ever wrote it."
In 2012 Parker noted that in Delbanco's own 2006 biography of Melville, he "had somehow learned about the existence" of "The Isle of the Cross," which he had "assured the readers of The New Republic I had merely 'surmised.