“Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life…”. So runs Melville's celebrated letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne for June 1^st 1851. Writing from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and not a little heady at the discovery of the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) for his Berkshire Hills neighbour in nearby Lenox, he was mid-way into composing the South Seas whale-epic in due course to be dedicated to Hawthorne and titled Moby-Dick (1851), and which would be the source of his own enduring literary fame. Melville's declaration carries all his typical infectious vitality of sound and sense. Few writers, American or otherwise, and of his own time or not, bring to the literary page

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First published 30 July 2003

Citation: Lee, A. Robert. "Herman Melville". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 July 2003.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3076, accessed 9 February 2010.]