SOURCE: Rosenblum, Joseph. “A Cock Fight between Melville and Thoreau.” Studies in Short Fiction 23, no. 2 (spring 1986): 159-67.

In the following essay, Rosenblum argues that Melville's short story “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” represents a critique of Thoreau's Transcendentalism as expressed in his volume A Week.

In 1948 Egbert S. Oliver suggested that Melville's “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” was intended as a satire “on the buoyant transcendental principles which Melville heard echoing and re-echoing in the New England hills, especially those emanating from Concord, and, more particularly, a passage from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.”¹ Since the appearance of Oliver's article, most critics have agreed that in this story Melville was attacking Thoreau, though there has been some disagreement on the precise butt of the satire. Thus, William Bysshe Stein claimed that it was a response to a passage in “Walking,” and more recently Allan Moore Emery has suggested that the story may allude...