The earliest surviving mention of Moby-Dick is from a May 1, 1850, letter in which Melville told fellow sea author Richard Henry Dana Jr. "I am half way in the work."[92] In June, he described the book to his English publisher as "a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries," and promised it would be done by the fall.[93] The original manuscript has not survived. That summer, Melville read Thomas Carlyle, borrowing copies of Sartor Resartus (1833–34) and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History (1841) from the library of his friend Evert Duyckinck.[94] These readings proved significant, occurring as Melville radically transformed his initial plan for the novel over the next several months, conceiving what Delbanco described in 2005 as "the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer".[95]
From August 4 to 12, 1850, the Melvilles, Sarah Morewood, Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and other literary figures from New York and Boston came to Pittsfield to enjoy a period of parties, picnics, dinners, and the like. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his publisher James T. Fields joined the group while Hawthorne's wife stayed at home to look after the children.[96] On one picnic outing organized by Duyckinck, Hawthorne and Melville sought shelter from the rain together and had a deep, private conversation. Melville had been given a copy of Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, though he had not yet read it.[97] Melville then avidly read it and wrote a review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses", which appeared in two installments, on August 17 and 24, in The Literary World. Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black".[98] He repeatedly compared Hawthorne to Shakespeare, and urged that "men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio." The critic Walter Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing Moby-Dick" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".[99] Later that summer, Duyckinck sent Hawthorne copies of Melville's three most recent books.[100] Hawthorne read them, as he wrote to Duyckinck on August 29 that Melville in Redburn and White-Jacket put the reality "more unflinchingly" before his reader than any writer, and he thought Mardi was "a rich book, with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life". But he cautioned, "It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better".[101]
In September 1850, Melville borrowed three thousand dollars from his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw to buy a 160-acre farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Melville called his new home Arrowhead because of the arrowheads that were dug up around the property during planting season.[102] That winter, Melville paid Hawthorne an unexpected visit, only to discover he was working and "not in the mood for company". Hawthorne's wife Sophia gave him copies of Twice-Told Tales and, for Malcolm, The Grandfather's Chair.[103] Melville invited them to visit Arrowhead soon, hoping to "[discuss] the Universe with a bottle of brandy & cigars" with Hawthorne, but Hawthorne would not stop working on his new book for more than one day and they did not come.[104] After a second visit from Melville, Hawthorne surprised him by arriving at Arrowhead with his daughter Una. According to Robertson-Lorant, "The handsome Hawthorne made quite an impression on the Melville women, especially Augusta, who was a great fan of his books". They spent the day mostly "smoking and talking metaphysics".[105]
Robertson-Lorant writes that Melville was "infatuated with Hawthorne's intellect, captivated by his artistry, and charmed by his elusive personality," but "the friendship meant something different to each of them," with Hawthorne offering Melville "the kind of intellectual stimulation he needed". They may have been "natural allies and friends," yet they were also "fifteen years apart in age and temperamentally quite different" and Hawthorne "found Melville's manic intensity exhausting at times".[106] Bezanson identifies "sexual excitement" in all the ten letters Melville wrote to the older man.[107] In the essay on Hawthorne's Mosses, Melville wrote: "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul." Melville dedicated his book to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne".
On October 18, 1851, The Whale was published in Britain in three volumes, and on November 14 Moby-Dick appeared in the United States as a single volume. In between these dates, on October 22, 1851, the Melvilles' second child, Stanwix, was born.[108] In December, Hawthorne told Duyckinck, "What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones."[109] Unlike other contemporaneous reviewers of Melville, Hawthorne had seen the uniqueness of Melville's new novel and acknowledged it. In early December 1852, Melville visited the Hawthornes in Concord and discussed the idea of the "Agatha" story he had talked of with Hawthorne. This was the last contact between the two writers before Melville visited Hawthorne in Liverpool four years later when Hawthorne had relocated to England.[110]
