I'm trying to understand why the story has become so iconic because the book was a commercial failure in its time and was critically divisive. It seems that literary scholars around 1930 reinvigorated interest in the book but why were they so interested in Melville specifically? Why did Stanley Thomas Williams supervise 12 dissertations on Melville? Is the specific taste of a single influential dude from the 1930's singlehandedly responsible for turning the book into the "great American novel"? Who gets to have their work remembered?

The book is fun to read, I admit, albeit too rambly for my tastes.