Herman & Nathaniel

On this day in 1850, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne met at a picnic with friends on Monument Mountain near Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hawthorne was 15 years older, and had spent his life in New England. Melville was born in New York and went to sea at 20. When they met, Hawthorne was a somewhat reserved short-story writer and Melville was the more outgoing author of four novels.
A short time later, Melville bought a farmhouse he called "Arrowhead" in Pittsfield. For a year and a half, the two friends lived six miles apart during the most productive time in their writing lives. It was during that period of the early 1850s that Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Melville published Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) in the same period. In fact, The Blithedale Romance and Pierre were written at the same time, and The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick were published only a year apart.