Dylan’s most intense period of wild inspiration and creativity ran from the beginning of 1965 to the summer of 1966. Photograph by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

For decades, there’s been a running academic debate about the question of “the hot hand”—the notion, in basketball, say, that a player has a statistically better chance of scoring from downtown if he’s been shooting that night with unusual accuracy. Put it this way: Stephen Curry, the point guard genius for the Golden State Warriors, who normally hits forty-four per cent of his threes, will raise his odds to fifty per cent or better if he’s already on a tear. He’s got a “hot hand.” If you watch enough N.B.A. ball, it appears to happen all the time. But does it? Thirty years ago, Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky, and Robert Vallone seemed to squelch the hot-hand theory with a stats-laden paper in the journal Cognitive Psychology, but, just last year, along came Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo, marshalling no less evidence, to insist that an “atypical clustering of successes” in three-point shooting was not a “widespread cognitive illusion” at all, but rather that it “occurs regularly.”

Steph Curry fans, who have been loyal witnesses to his improbable streaks from beyond the arc, surely agree with Professors Miller and Sanjurjo. But let’s assume that the debate, in basketball or at the blackjack table, remains open. What’s clear is that when it comes to the life of the imagination, the hot hand is a matter of historical fact. Novelists, composers, painters, and poets are apt to experience stretches of intense creativity that might derive from any number of factors—surrounding historical events, artistic rivalries, or, most mysteriously, inspiration—but the streak is undeniably there.

James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University, has written studies of two distinct periods in his subject’s life—one called “1599,” when Shakespeare wrote “Henry V,” “Julius Caesar,” “As You Like It,” and “Hamlet”; and a remarkable new volume, “The Year of Lear,” centering on 1606, a moment of religious fracture, horrific plague, and the political wake of the Gunpowder Plot, and the year in which Shakespeare wrote not only “Lear” but “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” Shapiro’s research shows that the political and social reasons for Shakespeare’s bursts of creativity were as essential to his art as was the community and structure of his life at the Globe. It’s the less concrete factors, the inner reasons—what’s called genius—that led to conspiracy theories and multiple-author hypotheses. Who could imagine that an artist could have a hot hand so frequently?

But such golden periods, which usually take place just once, if at ever, in the life of an artist, are undeniable. Take popular music. From 1965 to 1969, the Beatles, after a long apprenticeship in Germany and England and a series of records that leaned heavily on Chuck Berry and Little Richard, peeled off a string of albums that changed everything in popular music. From 1972 to 1976, Stevie Wonder, leaving his career as “Little Stevie” in the past, produced the albums that remain the center of his joyful achievement: “Music of My Mind,” “Talking Book,” “Innervisions,” “Fulfillingness’ First Finale,” and “Songs in the Key of Life.”

For Dylan, the greatest and most abundant songwriter who has ever lived, the most intense period of wild inspiration and creativity ran from the beginning of 1965 to the summer of 1966. (Yes, I get how categorical that statement is. If you’d like to make an argument for Nas, Lennon & McCartney, Smokey Robinson, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Jacques Brel, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern ... or fill-in-the-blank, write to .) Before that fifteen-month period, Bob Dylan, who was twenty-three, had already transformed folk music, building on Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. Now he was scribbling lyrics on pads and envelopes all night and listening to the Stones and the Beatles and feverishly reading the Surrealists and the Beats. In short order, he recorded the music for “Bringing It All Back Home” (the crossover to rock that ranges from “Mr. Tambourine Man” to “Subterranean Homesick Blues”); “Highway 61 Revisited” (the best rock album ever made; again, send your rebuttal to ); and “Blonde on Blonde” (a double album recorded in New York and Nashville that includes “Visions of Johanna” and “Just Like a Woman”).

In that same compacted period, Dylan travelled the U.K. as a solo act, a tour which is memorialized in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film “Dont Look Back”; scandalized Pete Seeger and much of the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival, on the night of July 25, 1965, by “going electric” and performing raucous versions of “Maggie’s Farm,” “Phantom Engineer” (later known as “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”), and “Like a Rolling Stone” with members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; and toured North America and the U.K. with the Hawks, a rootsy Canadian-American combo that soon became The Band. (The record of the U.K. tour, “Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” is, as a live album, in a rarefied class with James Brown’s “Live at the Apollo” and B. B. King’s “Live at the Regal.”)

Dylan was exploding with things to say and sing. As he later acknowledged, it was as if he were taking dictation from somewhere, from somebody. And, at the same time, he seemed on the brink of self-annihilation. Amped up on nicotine and speed and who knows what else, racing from place to place, thought to thought, song to song, and embittered by the jeering and booing he encountered from the folk-loyal fans from Newport to Manchester, Dylan was headed for a crash. One day, while riding his motorcycle near his house, in Woodstock, he was, according to one account, blinded by the sun, hit a slick in the road, and was smashed to the ground. The bike ended up on top of him. Having suffered a concussion and some broken vertebrae, Dylan “retired” to spend time in Woodstock out of the public eye with his wife, Sara Lownds, and their children.

“I couldn’t go on doing what I had been,” he said later. “I was pretty wound up before that accident happened. ... I probably would have died if I had kept on going as I had been.”

Dylan’s “electric period,” of course, was not contained in that manic, fifteen-month period. It’s a half-century long by now. In the coming days, Dylan and his band will be in Hamburg, Basel, Bregenz ... blink, and they’ll be in your neighborhood soon. And the funny thing is how, these days, with a set list that barely changes for months at a time, Dylan usually includes only one song from that 1965-66 period: “She Belongs to Me.” That might have been the breakthrough period—the moment, as Dylan has said, that he captured that elusive “wild mercury sound”—but the catalogue is rich in the way that Picasso’s was rich. There’s no end to it.

The shelves of Dylan books and bootlegs groan, but this week, if you care, our knowledge of the songs recorded in that golden period just got deeper. Elijah Wald, who has written fine books on Robert Johnson and Josh White, has published “Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties,” which provides a deeply researched and entertaining chronicle of the culture clash that Dylan sparked from the Newport stage, and his transition from work shirts to leather, from a Gibson Nick Lucas Special to a Fender Stratocaster.