The majority of Herman Melville's short stories form a distinct group in his oeuvre and a distinct moment in his literary career. As a writer he is best known for his epic novel Moby Dick (1851) the story of the heroic and obsessed Captain Ahab's search for the great white whale. He also published the novels Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and Mardi (1849), all based on his experiences in the Polynesian Islands; Redburn (1849), based on his voyage as a seaman to Liverpool in 1839; and White-Jacket (1850), an account of life as a sailor aboard a British man-of-war. Moby Dick, despite its great later reputation, received mixed reviews when it came out and sold badly. Another novel, Pierre (1852), was very harshly reviewed, and a recent critic describes it as ‘a work of moral and metaphysical nihilism that estranged him from his readership’. In the early 1850s Melville also suffered from family sorrows: his third child died in 1853 and his fourth in 1854. The new decade was therefore a time of doubt and self-searching for Melville.

At the beginning of that same decade, however, he wrote the essay ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’ already cited above, a review of Hawthorne's collection of tales, Mosses from an Old Manse. Melville discusses ‘Young Goodman Brown’, ‘Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent’, and ‘Earth's Holocaust’, as well as a number of sketches and stories which are less often read today, and praises Hawthorne for his ‘tenderness’, but above all for ‘his great deep intellect, which drops down into the Universe like a plummet’.