"You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in," wrote Herman Melville in Hawthorne the pseudonymous, two part review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) that he published in the Literary World for 17 and 24 August 1850. Melville had made his bow as an author with an outpouring of sea and adventure fiction whose centerpiece would shortly be Moby-Dick (1851), as capacious a narrative as nearly any in Western fiction. He had been obliged in his early twenties to escape the genteel poverty of his New York family by signing on as a seaman aboard a whaling ship, which sailed from New Bedford on 3 January 1841. He was not to return to the United States until October 1844, after having seen the great Atlantic and Pacific whale fisheries, and having been, at different times, a common sailor before the mast, a harpooner, a deserter from the crew of a...