Melville Off the Wagon

Abstract

Herman Melville owned wagons for almost the entirety of his thirteen years at Arrowhead, and his pleasure in using them makes regular appearances in his letters and in accounts of the author. In this note, I reveal a newly uncovered newspaper advertisement, published in the Berkshire County Eagle in 1863, in which Melville offers to sell his prized “pleasure wagon” after having taken a bad fall from it. Building off his writings about wagons and his recollections of driving in the Berkshires, I argue that the advertisement poignantly symbolizes the loss of Melville’s physical prime, his youth, and his home at Arrowhead.