Before writing Pierre, Melville read the Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Autobiographic Sketches and Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey, and Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. Henry A. Murray writes that Benjamin Disraeli's autobiographical novels provided him with "more raw material for Pierre than any other author" with the exception of Lord Byron.[1] Merton M. Sealts Jr. agrees with Murray that Melville's own fascination in his youth with Byron is reflected in the character of Pierre himself in the early chapters of the novel.[2] "The book which was most potent in fashioning Melville's ideal and thus indirectly affecting his personality and his writings", Murray suggests, was Thomas Moore's Life of Byron.[3] Second to Byron only, "though ahead of him as a source for the first two acts of Pierre", Disraeli—himself a Byronist—was another major influence of Melville's early ideal self-conception, and hence Pierre's personality.[3] Still other yet less consequential "architects of Melville's early ideal self and so of the character of Pierre of act 1" are Walter Scott, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Moore, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton.[4] Melville developed the characterization of Pierre further with William Makepeace Thackeray's Pendennis and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, though the spirit of Shakespeare's play pervades only the early chapters, later giving way to Hamlet's spirit. As stated in Book IX of Pierre, "Dante had made him fierce, and Hamlet had insinuated that there was no one to strike".[2]
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