Written with an intelligence and verve rarely found in rock biography, the mysterious artist that is Bob Dylan is illuminated through the cultural history of his time.

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.



The second volume in Ian Bell's magisterial two-part biography of the ever-evolving and enigmatic Bob Dylan

By the middle of the 1970s, Bob Dylan’s position as the pre-eminent artist of his generation was assured. The 1975 album Blood on the Tracks seemed to prove, finally, that an uncertain age had found its poet.

Then Dylan faltered. His instincts, formerly unerring, deserted him. in the 1980s, what had once appeared unthinkable came to pass: the “voice of a generation” began to sound irrelevant, a tale told to grandchildren.

Yet in the autumn of 1997, something remarkable happened. Having failed to release a single new song in seven long years, Dylan put out the equivalent of two albums in a single package. in the concluding volume of his ground- breaking study, ian Bell explores the unparalleled second act in a quintessentially american career. it is a tale of redemption, of an act of creative will against the odds, and of a writer who refused to fade away.

Time Out of Mind is the story of the latest, perhaps the last, of the many Bob Dylans.