Melville’s “October Mountain”: A Mystery Solved?

Abstract

Regarding Melville’s “October Mountain,” a purportedly lost essay attributed to him by contemporary biographer J. E. A. Smith, I suggest that no such work exists. The more likely explanation for Smith’s rather detailed account of it is that, writing from memory, he misremembered Henry Ward Beecher’s naturalistic essay “Mid-October Days” (1854) as one of Melville’s. In support of this thesis, I demonstrate that Beecher’s essay appeared the same month and year as the ostensible publication date of “October Mountain,” takes for its subject the same mountain in Pittsfield, and deploys the same sorts of imagery and philosophy that Smith seems to recall. Though it may exist anyway, “October Mountain” is more probably a bibliographical phantom—and a reminder that even contemporary biographers inevitably err. Such a dilemma, common to all biography, is especially thorny in the study of history’s more elusive personalities, about whom the tension between memory and investigation can nevertheless yield new insights. While different men with different personas, Melville and Beecher oddly had much in common, suggesting the opportunity for comparative readings of their lives and nature writings.