Claudia Dixon is a bold thinker and a natural writer. I wish writers like Claudia Dixon were producing all of our textbooks. In chapter three, she looks at Melville’s friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, and how much it meant to Melville that a fellow author understood what he was trying to do. In the following interview and excerpt from her dissertation, we see a hint of the author’s grand reinterpretation of Melville.