Melville's Pardonable Sin

Abstract

ary history. Although some doubt remains about the intensity of their relationship subsequent to the publication of MobyDick (1851), their friendship was at its height when they were neighbors in Berkshire, the most western county of Massachusetts. From May, 185o, until November, 1851, Hawthorne and his family lived in a farmhouse on the Tappan estate, about two miles west of the village of Lenox. In the summer of 1850 Melville and his wife were boarders in Pittsfield, six miles away. That fall, Melville purchased a farm in Pittsfield, where he lived for the next thirteen years. When Hawthorne and Melville finally met at the now-famous party in the Berkshires on August 5, 1850, they were both highly regarded by the literary world. In addition to short stories and sketches, many of which were collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Hawthorne had recently published The Scarlet Letter (1850) and was then writing The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Before he moved away fifteen months later, he had also written A Wonder-Book (1852) and parts of The Blithedale Romance (1852). Melville, though fifteen years younger, was already the author of five novels: Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850). More important, however, is the fact that Melville at the time of his meeting with Hawthorne was writing what would ultimately become his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. It has been generally concluded that until the time of his meeting with Hawthorne and his fiction, Melville was in the process of making Moby-Dick another sea narrative in which he would finally make use of his knowledge of the whaling industry, and that Melville's relationship with Hawthorne re-