A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Olson has been a tireless student of Melville and every Melville lover owes him a debt for his Scotland Yard pertinacity in getting on the trail of Melville's dispersed library. For Melville, whose eyes were permanently damaged after a childhood bout of scarlet fever, this simple fact allowed him to engage with Shakespeare’s work in a way he never had before. The coffin had previously been made by the ship's carpenter for Queequeg when the latter was suffering from a severe fever.

The reception of The Whale in Britain and of Moby-Dick in the United States differed in two ways, according to Parker. His close reading of them occupies the central section of the essay, as he traces the passage of Melville’s thought from flyleaf scribbles into the manuscript of his novel. The creation of Ahab, Melville biographer Leon Howard discovered, followed an observation by Coleridge in his lecture on Hamlet: "one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in morbid excess, and then to place himself. A little higher up the screen, “atcDave” poses the question of what would actually be the greatest novel ever written.Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with the use of many different genres including sermons, stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings. The Pequod next encounters the Jeroboam, which not only lost its chief mate to Moby Dick, but also is now plagued by an epidemic.

The earliest American review, in the Boston Post for November 20, quoted the London Athenaeum 's scornful review, not realizing that some of the criticism of The Whale did not pertain to Moby-Dick. The reading of this wondrous story on the landless sea, and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck, had a surprising effect upon me.

Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings, coincidings, and leewardings. Chapters 24, 31, 32, 44, 54, 55, 56, 59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 94, 101, 102, 103 and 104. Ishmael travels in December from Manhattan Island to New Bedford, Massachusetts, with plans to sign up for a whaling voyage. The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850–1851, when Melville had changed the noise of New York City for a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.