Excerpt from Dayswork by Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

This Hawthorne shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.

This, according to one Melville biographer, is "one of the two most erotically charged passages in nineteenth-century American literature."
Lamentably, she doesn't identify the other.

(With only his iPhone and some trail mix, my husband set out from the peninsula to discover the unknown erotic passage.)

Although the reputedly Southern author of "Hawthorne and His Mosses" claims never to have met his subject—I never saw the man—Melville had met Hawthorne days earlier when they hiked Monument Mountain with "other local Berkshires celebrities."

Hawthorne arrived that day with his publisher in a "sumptuous" carriage.—
He was, according to one Melville biographer, "the most beautiful man Melville or any of his contemporaries had seen."

"[S]o darkly gorgeous," according to the Biographer.

He was so strikingly handsome, in fact, that a woman on a snowy road in Maine once asked his walking companions, "Is he a man or an angel?"

Moreover, he dressed well, favoring a black cape and cravat. When writing, he wore a "faded purple and gold damask-patterned robe" made by his wife.

Melville, by contrast, was "a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen," as Hawthorne once noted in his journal.

Hawthorne's son, Julian, recalled that Melville dressed such that he might be mistaken for a tramp.

He was, according to Julian, "the strangest being that ever came into our circle"—
Mr. Omoo, the family called him.

When he told his astonishing stories, he would act them out and play all the parts:
Savages, breaching whales, captains and their ragged crews.
Castaways smashing coconuts on rocks.

"The things he told of seemed to be actually taking place there in our little sitting-room," wrote Julian.
His mother once searched for "that awful club" that Mr. Omoo had brandished during one of his violent and captivating tales, but there was no club, never had been.

Melville would show up at their "little red shanty" in a shaggy coat, dusted with snow, having walked the six miles to Lenox from his Pittsfield farm.
With his enormous dog, a Newfoundland—"black as Erebus."

Perhaps in some dim attic there is a letter, foxed with age, that reveals the dog's name.

Forty miles away, Emily Dickinson also owned a Newfoundland—
Carlo, named after the pointer in her favorite novel, Jane Eyre.

Excerpted from Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. Copyright © 2023 by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.