The manuscript of this novel was discovered by John J. Healey in a box left by his grandfather, Professor Vincent P. Healey, after his death. This engaging work of fiction is a romantic account in which four iconic figures of American Letters play a leading role.

In the summer of 1851 Herman Melville was finishing Moby Dick on his family farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Surrounded by his mother, sisters and pregnant wife, it was a calm and productive season until his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne lured him to Amherst. There they met twenty-year-old Emily Dickinson and her brother Austin. On a whim the two distinguished authors invited the Dickinson siblings to accompany them on a trip to Boston and New York. In Manhattan they met journalist Walt Whitman and William Johnson, a runaway slave, and it was there, despite their efforts to control it, that Emily and Herman fell in love.

This, for the first time, is their story.

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John J. Healey was born and raised in New York City and has lived at least half of his life thus far in Spain. Curiously enough he wrote Emily & Herman in Europe and only moved to the Berkshires in Massachusetts after the fact. In 1998 he made a documentary film about the life and work of Federico García Lorca for European TV, and in 2010 made another documentary about the American poet Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild.