How a champagne picnic on Monument Mountain led to a profound revision of Moby Dick — and disenchantment. A little group of American men of affairs and letters met along with their ladies on the morning of August 5, , to hike up Monument Mountain, one of the more prominent features of the landscape surrounding Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
The intention was purely social, and socially the day proved a smashing success, leading five of the ten hikers to record the event in letters, journals, articles, and books.
For two of them, however, the climb was the beginning of one of the strangest episodes in the history of American literature. It was on Monument Mountain that Herman Melville, who had paused before putting the finishing touches on a new novel based upon the whaling industry, met Nathaniel Hawthorne, fresh from the critical success of The Scarlet Letter. The meeting led to a deeply important relationship between the two men that caused Melville to recast his novel as the great Moby Dick.
It also set in motion a succession of missed personal opportunities, false starts, and misunderstandings that were the source of great bitterness for the remainder of his life. Melville had returned from abroad in February of to his home in Manhattan with greatly mixed feelings about the course his writing career was taking.
His first novel, Typee , had been an auspicious entry into the treacherous waters of American publishing.
