This book offers the first in-depth examination of the friendship between the authors. Hawthorne's influence upon
Moby-Dick
is weighed, as is the probability of Melville's influence upon Hawthorne. This was a friendship whose true basis—beyond an almost instantaneous mutual affinity and admiration for each other—was intellectual ideas and literary pursuits, and the conversations between the two hewed mostly to philosophical and spiritual rumination as well as to those matters that concern writers most: craft and publishing.