Monument Mountain: Where Hawthorne Met Melville
Near Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Rising north of town, Monument Mountain is a quartzite ridge of pink cliffs and pitch pine, and it holds one of the most celebrated moments in American literature. On the fifth of August, eighteen fifty, a lawyer hosted a picnic hike up the mountain for a group of writers. Among them were Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had just published The Scarlet Letter, and a younger novelist named Herman Melville, who was struggling with a book about a whale.
When a sudden thunderstorm drove the party into a rocky shelter, the two men fell into deep conversation, and a powerful friendship was born. Melville was so inspired that he dedicated his masterpiece, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne. The mountain had already earned its place in verse.
Years earlier the poet William Cullen Bryant, who lived and worked in Great Barrington, wrote a poem called Monument Mountain, telling a Mahican legend of a young woman who leapt from the cliffs over a forbidden love. A cairn of stones near the summit is said to mark the tale. Today the reservation is protected land, laced with popular trails that climb to the rocky summit, where hikers still take in sweeping views across the Berkshires.
