Calculations for Popularity: Melville's Pierre and Holden's Dollar Magazine

Abstract

CN summer before Melville wrote Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), work he described as very much more calculated for than his books since Omoo (1847), his notion of popular writing came to center on magazines. In a 20 July 1851 letter to his British publisher, Richard Bentley, Melville associated taste of the overwhelming majority of America's reading public with journalism; concentrating on issue of popularity led him to disregard even grossest distinctions of genre or format referring to those most saleable of all books nowadays-i e-the newspapers, & magazines.' Only a few weeks earlier Melville had observed Hawthorne's growing celebrity most specifically conjunction with Holden's Dollar Magazine. By way, he wrote Hawthorne, in last 'Dollar Magazine' I read 'The Unpardonable Sin'.... I have no doubt you are by this time responsible for many a shake and tremor of tribe of 'general readers' (p. 129). While Melville was himself continuing to struggle, as he drew near completing Moby-Dick, with his perennially conflicting intentions to I feel most moved to write and what