EMILY & HERMAN CL

Themanuscript of this novel was discovered by John J. Healey in a box left by hisgrandfather, Professor Vincent P. Healey, after his death. This engaging workof fiction is a romantic account in which four iconic figures of AmericanLetters play a leading role. In thesummer of 1851 Herman Melville was finishing Moby Dick on his family farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Surrounded byhis mother, sisters and pregnant wife, it was a calm and productive seasonuntil his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne lured him to Amherst. There they mettwenty-year-old Emily Dickinson and her brother Austin. On a whim the twodistinguished authors invited the Dickinson siblings to accompany them on atrip to Boston and New York. In Manhattan they met journalist Walt Whitman andWilliam Johnson, a runaway slave, and it was there, despite their efforts tocontrol it, that Emily and Herman fell in love. This,for the first time, is their story.