Bob Dylan in America [Paperback]

A unique look at Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's place in American cultural history through unprecedented access to Dylan's studio tapes, recording notes, and rare photographs.

Sean Wilentz discovered Bob Dylan’s music as a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village. Now, almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan.
 
Beginning with Dylan’s explosion onto the scene in 1961, Wilentz follows the emerging artist as he develops a body of work unique in America’s cultural history. Using his unprecedented access to studio tapes, recording notes, and rare photographs, he places Dylan’s music in the context of its time and offers a stunning critical appreciation of Dylan both as a songwriter and performer.

Wilentz’s book stands apart . . . in the lucidity of its prose, the rigor of its research and convincing originality of the place he assigns his subject in the context of American cultural history. . . . Here is scholarship that successfully slips the bonds of specialty and pretension.” —Los Angeles Times
 
“Author Sean Wilentz combines a lifelong music fan’s enthusiasm with a history detective’s doggedness to unearth Dylan’s entire root system. . . . The book is at once a time-hopping biography; a catalog of Dylan’s myriad, eclectic influences . . . and a primer on American music.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“Not just another biography of the chameleon folkie-rock-star-poet-troubadour. . . . At once deeply felt and historically layered.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Among those who write about Dylan, Wilentz possesses the rare virtues of modesty, nuance and lucidity, and for that he should be celebrated and treasured.” —The New York Times Book Review