"Document it and file it, even if it's better not to: It's the night of December 10, 1831, and Allan Melvill is walking across the frozen Hudson River." Based on Herman Melville and his father Allan Melvill--plowing through childhood days at the bedside of a hallucinated man and nights as a twilight writer who no longer wields a pen nor harpoon-- Melvill goes on the hunt for the enigma of the always orphaned literary vocation, for the legacy of family stigma, the steersmen of fiction, and the castaways of reality.
