PROGRAM
Please join us as we welcome Sean Wilentz, one of America’s finest historians – and most illustrious experts on Bob Dylan – to Roosevelt House. Wilentz will be in discussion with Dylan’s legendary audio engineer Richard Alderson to discuss his book Bob Dylan in America and the recently re-released 1966 Live Recordings, as well as commemorate the awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature to one of the country’s greatest and most enduring artists.
Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager; almost half a century later, he revisits Dylan’s work with the skills of an eminent American historian as well as the passion of a fan. Drawn in part from Wilentz’s essays as “historian in residence” of Dylan’s official website, Bob Dylan in America is a unique blend of fact, interpretation, and affinity — a book that, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion warrants.
Beginning with his explosion onto the scene in 1961, this book follows Dylan as he continues to develop a body of musical and literary work unique in our cultural history, that is now taking its rightful place in the history of world literature.
Wilentz has had unprecedented access to studio tapes, recording notes, rare photographs, and other materials, all of which allow him to tell Dylan’s story and that of such masterpieces as Blonde on Blonde with an unprecedented authenticity and richness.
We hope you will join us at Roosevelt House for this special evening.
