Sean Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America

Saturday, October 23
7:30 pm | Ina and Jack Kay Community Hall
Tickets: $11, Discounted Members/Seniors/Under 25 $9

With unprecedented access to Dylan’s working tapes, recording notes, rare photographs and other key materials, Sean Wilentz has written a comprehensive account of Dylan’s life and music and its influence on American culture.

Beginning with his explosion onto the scene in 1961, the book follows Dylan as he continues to develop a body of musical and literary work unique in our cultural history. Wilentz’s places Dylan’s music in the context of its time, including the early influences of Popular Front ideology and Beat aesthetics, and offers a larger critical appreciation of Dylan as both a songwriter and performer. Wilentz tells Dylan’s story and that of such masterpieces as Blonde on Blonde with an unprecedented authenticity and richness.

Bob Dylan in America also chronicles Wilentz’s strange, interrupted, and lucky connection to Dylan and his work. Sean Wilentz’s family owned the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, which served as a cultural staple during the heyday of the beat writers and Dylan’s hip folk club scene.  In fact, Bob Dylan met Allen Ginsberg in Sean’s uncle’s apartment above the shop. This early crossing of paths between Wilentz and Dylan, led to Sean’s lifelong interest and fascination with Dylan’s work. He charts Dylan’s life and music from those early days in Greenwich Village up until the present in this groundbreaking, thorough, and totally absorbing work.

Sean Wilentz is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University.  His previous books include The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  In addition to his writing as historian-in-residence at www.bobdylan.com, Wilentz was nominated for a Grammy for his liner notes to ‘Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964—Concert at Philharmonic Hall.

“Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony ‘encyclopedia’ compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in.  Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.” —Al Kooper

“A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles.  In fact, reading Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song.” —Martin Scorsese

See Sean on The Colbert Report!

See the full line up at washingtondcjcc.org/litfest.