ABSTRACT
IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1837, WHEN HERMAN MELVILLE WAS AN EIGHTEEN-year-old man about to begin a short, unsuccessful engagement as a teacher in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the students and faculty at Harvard.1 Though Melville did not hear Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa oration, “The American Scholar,” his future father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw-Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and Fellow of the Harvard Corporation-was present.2 Shaw had been a friend and legal advisor of Melville’s father, who died in 1832, and Herman was a frequent visitor in the Shaw home in later years. Through Shaw or otherwise, Melville surely became familiar with Emerson’s celebrated portrait of the selfreliant scholar as “Man Thinking,” which led Oliver Wendell Holmes to characterize this speech as “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.”3
