Once Upon a Time by Ian Bell
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 he did. How he did it - and why - has never fully been explored.In Once Upon a Time, award-winning writer 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 the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America. Once Upon a Time is a study of a personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever struggling to understand itself. Dylan has become the mystery that illuminates. Here, in the first part of a major two-volume work, the mystery is explained.
“A white-hot bullet of a book” -- Biographile
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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
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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
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781605986272 |
| ISBN 10 | 1605986275 |
| Title | Once Upon a Time |
| Author | Ian Bell |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Pegasus Books |
| Year published | 2014-11-21 |
| Number of pages | 592 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |