Once Upon a Time
The Lives of Bob Dylan
Published on 21. November 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
592 pages
978-1-60598-627-2 (ISBN)
Description
Half a century ago, a youth appeared from the American hinterland and began a cultural revolution. The world is still coming to terms with what Bob Dylan accomplished in his artistic explosion upon popular culture.
In Once Upon a Time, award-winning author Ian Bell draws together the tangled strands of the many lives of Bob Dylan in all their contradictory brilliance. For the first time, the laureate of modern America is set in his entire context: musical, historical, literary, political, and personal.
Full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life, and his era, this new biography reveals anew the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America. Once Upon a Time is a lively investigation of a mysterious personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever trying to understand itself. Now that mystery is explained.
In Once Upon a Time, award-winning author Ian Bell draws together the tangled strands of the many lives of Bob Dylan in all their contradictory brilliance. For the first time, the laureate of modern America is set in his entire context: musical, historical, literary, political, and personal.
Full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life, and his era, this new biography reveals anew the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America. Once Upon a Time is a lively investigation of a mysterious personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever trying to understand itself. Now that mystery is explained.
Reviews / Votes
"A white-hot bullet of a book." -- Biographile "This is best described as a fully formed emotional biography, a fascinating read about an artist who, to this day, defends his right of artistic autonomy, refusing to be anyone but himself, whoever that may be. " -- Booklist, starred review " It's an iconic American life, and Bell has written the most thorough, thoughtful, unblinded, skeptical but caring book that life has yet earned.
" -- The Los Angeles Review of Books " Bell writes beautifully, in rhythmic, incantatory, prose. An imagined reliving of an already imaginary life, and a book to sit alongside Richard Ellmann on Wilde, John Richardson on Picasso, and Peter Ackroyd on Dickens. This is the best Dylan biography yet.
" -- The Financial Times " Ambitious. Bell handles Dylan brilliantly.
" -- The Spectator
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 41 mm
Weight
500 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-60598-627-2 (9781605986272)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Previous edition
Book
11/2013
Pegasus Books
€48.47
No shipping information available
Person
Ian Bell is a past holder of the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism and the award-winning author of Dreams of Exile, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a columnist with the Herald and the Sunday Herald in Edinburgh.