Description

In 2016 it was announced that Bob Dylan had sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin – author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and ‘perhaps the world’s authority on all things Dylan’ (Rolling Stone) – to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa – as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office – so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers – Dylan himself included – have said is wrong; often as not, a case of, Print the Legend.

This is the second instalment of the definitive biography (following A Restless Hungry Feeling) of one contemporary culture’s most iconic and mysterious figures – musical revolutionary, Nobel Prize-winner, chart-topping recording artist.

Clinton Heylin’s meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.

Publisher Review

Heylin is the most dedicated and forensic Dylanologists, and this book shows it * Daily Telegraph * I can’t imagine anyone else poking, prodding and taking apart Dylan with as much forensic detail as Heylin has done here * The Times * No true Dylan fan will want to miss what is as close to a definitive biography as we’re likely to get of an artist who has easy definition * Daily Mail * Remarkable… This is not just another Bob Dylan book… it’s so all-encompassing that it is probably the last word * i * For Dylan completists this monumental fact-check will be essential * New Statesman *