First published in 1947, this acknowledged classic of American literary criticism explores the influencesespecially Shakespearean oneson Melville's writing of Moby-Dick. One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the ''theory of the two Moby-Dicks,'' Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville's reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: ''the first book did not contain Ahab,'' writes Olson, and ''it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick.'' If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the ''theory of the two Moby-Dicks,'' it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy.
