SOURCE: “Melville's Alma and The Book of Mormon,” in Emerson Society Quarterly, Vol. 43, II Quarter, 1966, pp. 41-46.

In the following essay, Rees investigates the question of whether or not nineteenth-century American novelist Herman Melville was influenced by The Book of Mormon.

In letters to three different people, not long after Mardi had been published, Melville spoke of what he felt was its latent excellence. To his father-in-law Judge Lemuel Shaw, he wrote, “Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve ‘Mardi’.”¹ In a letter to Richard Bentley, 5 June 1849, Melville assured him, “‘Mardi’ in its higher purposes, has not been written in vain” (Letters, p. 86), and added in a letter the following month, “Your report concerning ‘Mardi’ was pretty much as I expected; but you know perhaps that there are goodly harvests which ripen late, especially when the grain is strong” (Letters, p. 87). And to his friend...