"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850) is an essay and critical review by Herman Melville of the short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1846. Published pseudonymously by "a Virginian spending July in Vermont", it appeared in The Literary World magazine in two issues: August 17 and August 24, 1850. It has been called the "most famous literary manifesto of the American nineteenth century."
Melville's call in “Mosses” for a unique American literature was early expression of the mid-nineteenth century Young America movement. Yet it was not reprinted until 1922, after the start of the Melville Revival, and was not widely recognized for several decades.[1]