On one meeting Melville showed Hawthorne a draft of Moby-Dick. Hawthorne, himself currently completing The Scarlet Letter, persuaded his friend to rework it from a tale of the high seas to an epic allegory that told not only a tale, but probed the defeats and triumphs of the human spirit. Melville delayed his submission to his publishers until it could meet Hawthorne's exacting standards. When it did, Hawthorne at last pronounced that the tragic tale was "cooked in hellfire." It was the praise Melville had sought.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "On one meeting Melville showed Hawthorne a draft of Moby-Dick. Hawthorne, himself currently completing The Scarlet Letter, persuaded his friend to rework it from a tale of the high seas to an epic allegory that told not only a tale, but probed the defeats and triumphs of the human spirit. Melville delayed his submission to his publishers until it could meet Hawthorne's exacting standards. When it did, Hawthorne at last pronounced that the tragic tale was "cooked in hellfire." It was the praise Melville had sought." in the context of "Marlene Wagman-Geller, on some of the reasons for Melville's dedication of Moby-Dick: "In Token of my admiration for his genius this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne", in Once Again to Zelda : The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications (2008), p. 13" to mean that wisdom is timeless.