Hawthorne was not the only American author making an “artistic study” of works selling well in the American marketplace. In addition to Olson's charge that Melville was a notorious literary pickpocket, Hennig Cohen also remarked on Melville's strong “tendency to respond to what was afloat in the popular culture.” Similarly, a reader can take as significant Strachey's intuition that Melville had become “very strongly under the spell of Balzac.” Additionally, until the year of their meeting, both Hawthorne and Melville were in debt and shared with Balzac, not only the dream of self-sufficiency by writing alone, but real poverty. Balzac's ultimate rise to popularity by the skill of his narratives was an object lesson for both Americans.

However, while Hawthorne had, despite his earlier whining, at last by 1850 captured the popularity he wanted with The Scarlet Letter, Melville was still concerned with crafting a masterpiece; the networks and the moment seemed right to bring him a similar windfall. While Strachey notes that in Redburnr Melville was developing an important Balzacian effect, at least in his villain Jackson, and it was clear in White-Jacket that he was starting to explore in depth psychological realities through the metaphor of the jacket, he was still trapped by allegory, particularly in the ponderous ending of White-Jacket, where in excruciating detail he stretches a trope of society as a sailing vessel ad nauseam.

Most of Melville's creative efforts after his trip to Europe in 1849 were devoted to working on a narrative about whaling excursions, much in the way and in the context in which he had thought about travel on men-of-war or packet boats: as another sea-faring account. The earliest extant reference to what would become Moby-Dick is in a letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., dated May 1, 1850, in which Melville told Dana,