During their stagecoach journey, Pierre finds and reads a fragment of a treatise on "Chronometricals and Horologicals" on the differences between absolute and relative virtue by one Plotinus Plinlimmon.

Henry A. Murray writes that Benjamin Disraeli's autobiographical novels provided him with "more raw material for Pierre than any other author" with the exception of Lord Byron.

[2] "The book which was most potent in fashioning Melville's ideal and thus indirectly affecting his personality and his writings", Murray suggests, was Thomas Moore's Life of Byron.

[3] Still other yet less consequential "architects of Melville's early ideal self and so of the character of Pierre of act 1" are Walter Scott, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Moore, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

[2] The characteristics of the style, described by Murray as a "miscellany of grammatical eccentricities, convoluted sentences, neologisms, and verbal fetishisms", are by themselves enough to set Pierre off as "a curiosity of literature.

On March 4, Bentley replied and offered to publish the new work without an advance sum, citing the poor sales of Melville's previous books as the reason for his proposal.

[12] Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker characterize the novel as "an ambitious experiment in psychological fiction" whose primary focus is the "complex workings of the human psyche", especially the "tortuous processes of distortion and self-deception involved in fervid states of mind combining religious exaltation and sexual arousal."

The novel, Delbanco feels, is ambivalent in dealing with the "rather too loving" supervision of his mother and his "ardent sentiment" for Glen, the young man who is his cousin, with whom he explored "the preliminary love-friendship of boys.

In frustration and retaliation, Parker concludes, Melville, perhaps in two or three batches, may only then have added the sections dealing with Pierre's literary career, especially the chapter "Young America in Literature", which describes publishers and critics in scathing terms.

[18] Melville scholar John Bryant praised this edition's illustrations by Maurice Sendak, which present Pierre as a "full-blown adolescent: muscular, ecstatic, desperate, devoted, and lonely; he is the man-child invincible."

[19] Walter Leyden Brown[20] directed a theatrical adaptation of the book at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village in 1974.

[21] The book was the source for the 1999 French film Pola X and its extended cut for television, Pierre ou, Les ambiguïtés, both directed by Leos Carax.

The Denver Center Theatre Company developed and produced the world premiere of Pierre in 2002, a stage play written by Jeffrey Hatcher, and directed by Bruce K. Sevy.

American composer Richard Beaudoin wrote an opera based on the book; Act I was staged in August 2007 at London's Arcola Theatre. ]