Bob Dylan’s abrupt abandonment of overtly political songwriting in the mid-1960s caused an uproar among critics and fans. In Wicked Messenger, acclaimed cultural-political commentator Mike Marqusee advances the new thesis that Dylan did not drop politics from his songs but changed the manner of his critique to address the changing political and cultural climate and, more importantly, his own evolving aesthetic. Wicked Messenger is also a riveting political history of the United States in the 1960s. Tracing the development of the decade’s political and cultural dissent movements, Marqusee shows how their twists and turns were anticipated in the poetic aesthetic—anarchic, unaccountable, contradictory, punk— of Dylan's mid-sixties albums, as well as in his recent artistic ventures in Chronicles, Vol. I and Masked and Anonymous. Dylan’s anguished, self-obsessed, prickly artistic evolution, Marqusee asserts, was a deeply creative response to a deeply disturbing situation. "He can no longer tell the story straight," Marqusee concludes, "because any story told straight is a false one."

At sixty years old, Bob Dylan is still singing the songs which for forty years have made him one of the most preeminent voices of our time. In this revised and much expanded edition of Stephen Scobie's landmark study of Dylan's work, the author covers all the stages of a remarkable career: from his incandescent impact on the mid-1960s, when Dylan revolutionized folk and popular music, to his later reinvention of himself as a traveling performer-the old blues musician whose work may no longer be fashionable but is still intensely relevant and rewarding.The 1991 edition of Alias Bob Dylan was hailed as a definitive study. The present volume is greatly revised, expanded and updated.

A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music – now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 – and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.

Offers a historical look at the life and career of Bob Dylan from four perspectives: his relationship to blackness, the influence of his singing style, his image on film, and his songwriting.

Bestselling author David Dalton goes in seach of the real Bob Dylan in an electrifying biography that puts all the others in the shade. As an artist Bob Dylan has been a major force for half a century. As a musical influence he is without equal. Yet as a man he has always acted like an outlaw on the run, constantly seeking to cover his tracks by confounding investigators with a dizzying array of aliases, impersonations, tall tales and downright lies. David Dalton presents Dylan's extraordinary life in such a way that his subject's techniques for hiding in full sight are gradually exposed for what they are, Despite the changing images, the spiritual body swerves, the manipulative nature and the occasionally baffling lurches between making sublime music and self-indulgent whimsy, the real Bob Dylan has never been more visible. Among the eyewitnesses cited are Marianne Faithful, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Larry 'Ratso' Sloman, Nat Hentoff, Suze Rotolo and many more. Yet in the end it is Dalton's impressive ability to find revealing patterns in Dylan's multiple disguises that reveals more than we ever expected to learn about the real man behind the Dylan legend.