Thomas Seltzer published Studies in Classic American Literature the last week of August 1923, and reviews appeared in newspapers and magazines across the United States. The reviews were mixed, but remarkably, some leading American critics quite liked the book. Robert Spiller, whose name would be synonymous with well researched, finely nuanced literary history, enjoyed Lawrence's critical study very much, calling it “one of the most stimulating things that has come into literary criticism for a long time,” praising the “brilliancy of its incomparable wit and keen judgment” and finding the “display of verbal fireworks … breathtaking.”

Raymond Weaver reviewed Studies in Classic American Literature alongside Stanley T. Williams's similarly titled Studies in Victorian Literature. Contrasting the two, Weaver remarked: “While Mr. Lawrence has gone beating about in the dark forest of his mind scaring up the inmates of that jungle, Professor Williams has been cultivating his quiet little garden.” Uneven, idiosyncratic, almost out of control, Lawrence's volume, in Weaver's opinion, displays an ambition that Williams's elegantly crafted little work lacks. Williams, who would become an influential figure in the study of American literature himself, later commented on Lawrence's Melville chapters, finding them absurd but thought-provoking, oversimplistic but delightful, perceptive but passionate, apocalyptic but humorous.

In November, the month Spiller and Weaver published their reviews, Lawrence was in Mexico. The third week of the month he reached Vera Cruz and, on the twenty-second, embarked on a voyage home aboard the Toledo, a steamship bound for Plymouth, England. The Toledo took him home. But Lawrence would move so many times during the last decade of his life that keeping track of his whereabouts can be difficult. Only a few places are pertinent to the story of his continuing interest in the life and work of Herman Melville.

After reaching England in December, Lawrence came to Hampstead to stay at the home of Donald and Catherine Carswell; there he joined Frieda, who had returned to England earlier after a vicious argument. The return visit did not brighten Lawrence's outlook on the land of his birth, especially after sunny Mexico. Writing Mountsier around the time of the winter solstice, Lawrence announced: “Here I am back in London. It seems very dark, and one seems to creep under a pavingstone of a sky, like some insect in the damp.”