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.