American Literature / Unit 8 AML 0730 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Hawthorne and Melville: The Friendship and the Essay
Captions available
The idea
Melville met Hawthorne in the Berkshires while writing Moby-Dick, dedicated the book to him, and wrote an essay praising the blackness in Hawthorne's work that he said no deeply thinking mind could escape. The friendship cooled, but the essay states the dark Romantic case exactly.
In practice
One writer naming the other's darkness.
Where people slip
The essay is Melville describing himself as well.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it