'The definitive scrupulously researched biography of a life steeped in mystery' Observer
The definitive biography of one contemporary culture's most iconic and mysterious figures -
musical revolutionary Nobel Prize-winner chart-topping recording artist 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. With fresh and revealing information
on every page A Restless Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his
arrival in early 1961 in New York where he is embraced by the folk scene his elevation to
spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil
Rights movement his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965 his
subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band and the recording of his three
undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde
on Blonde . At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in
Woodstock upstate New York and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges he looks
different his voice sounds different his songs are different. That other story will be told
in Volume 2 to be published in autumn 2022. 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.
