An August 4, 1850 picnic atop Monument Mountain, in the Berkshires, was postponed for two hours when a sudden thunderstorm made the procession of picnickers up America’s second most celebrated summit, after Bunker Hill, dash for cover.
How appropriate that the alchemy of weather is the catalyst that began the friendship between Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Herman Melville (1819-1891). Nature is what distinguishes the Berkshires, and the full exploitation of their natural talents is what catapulted those writers to the apex of world literature.
The expulsion of tyranny is what allowed our founding generation to establish new world order on the American continent, alongside British Canada, Franco-Spanish Florida, and Spanish Mexico. That expulsion also inspired the creation of American literature, fated to soon take the world be storm.
What is revolutionary about American literature is that it has no aspiration less than the glorification of all nature. No longer is the God of a nation’s religions, or the head of the ruling regime, the default object of an American author’s praise; American literature redesigns the paradigm, making nature herself the object of literary praise and celebration.
The picnic party included Hawthorne’s publisher and Melville’s friend, Evert Augustus Duyckinck. When Melville told him how charged he was by a two hour conversation with Hawthorne, Duyckinck encouraged him to write review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, published four years earlier, for his literary magazine. So, Melville put aside his current project, Moby Dick, and wrote Hawthorne and His Mosses, printed in two installments later that month!