Beginning with Dylan’s explosion onto the scene in 1961, historian Sean Wilentz’s comprehensive new tome, Bob Dylan in America, approaches Dylan not as a songwriter or musician but as a fellow historian who throughout his career has developed a body of musical and literary work unique in America’s cultural history. The book is out now via Doubleday and we have five copies of the book up for grabs for our lovely readers. To win a copy, e-mail whenyouawakela @ gmail.com (subject: Bob Dylan in America) and tell us your address and what favorite Dylan lyric is. Five winners will be picked and contacted. Read more about the book after the jump.

Though Wilentz did not interview Dylan himself, he was allowed unprecedented access to an assemblage of recording notes and studio session sheets, not to mention rare photographs, and other materials which make for quite an interesting read, particularly if you’re seeking something other than the typical hagiographic biography. Wilentz takes a critical look at many of the high points in Dylan’s career in this new work, but don’t expect to find detailed minutae about all of Dylan’s recordings, his concerts or rehashings of oft-told tales like Dylan going “electric” at Newport. In fact, the author often veers away from the subject Dylan himself, and focuses instead on how he fits into the larger context of American cultural history.

There are even some chapters in which Dylan doesn’t make much of an appearance at all, including the one on Blind Willie McTell, a blues singer and 12-string guitarist who was based in Atlanta and recorded from the ’20s through the ’50s. The author’s in-depth research uncovers many of the connections and associations Dylan has with American history itself, like a living diorama of Dylan’s conscious and unconscious socio-cultural influences, and then compares and contrasts them with specific periods and movements. One example is the chapter on the socialist-folk Popular Front of the thirties and forties, which concludes not with Dylan’s avowed predecessor Woody Guthrie, but with composer Aaron Copland, whom Dylan never actually met.

In Wilentz’s own introduction to the book, the author describes how he was exposed to Dylan’s music early in his life, in New York City’s Greenwich Village:

“While growing up in Brooklyn Heights, my family ran the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a place that helped nurture the Beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the early 1960s. My father, Elias Wilentz, edited The Beat Scene, one of the earliest anthologies of Beat poetry. Down from the shop, on MacDougal Street, was an epicenter of the folk-music explosion, the Folklore Center, run by my father’s friend Israel Young, whom everyone called Izzy, an outsized enthusiast with an impish grin and a heavy Bronx-Jewish accent. Nothing in that setting was anything I had sought out, or had any idea was going to become important. As things turned out, I was just lucky.”

Wilentz goes on to describe that he first heard about Bob Dylan by eavesdropping on a conversation his father was having with his friend Izzy, but he then reveals that he didn’t really connect with Dylan’s music until much later. The author admits right up front that he’s not one who should be considered a Dylan-ologist, even bristling at the term which has so often been applied to music critics and historians who try to assess and interpret Dylan’s musical offerings without exploring their own reasons for doing so, saying that “too much of that stuff is written by people who wish they were Bob Dylan instead of themselves. leave the pinning-down to the lepidopterists.”

Wilentz’s father, who was known to his friends as Eli, owned and operated the 8th Street Bookshop from 1947 to 1979, and the shop had been closed for many years when his father passed away in the mid-90s, an occasion that led Wilentz to the discovery that he and Dylan both shared a love of American history, sharing an interest in the “power of the past,” which he refers to collectively as “Dylan World.” Wilentz even wrote a piece for Dissent about how he’d coped with his grief over his father’s death by listening to Dylan’s 1993 cover of a well-known American hymn, “The Lone Pilgrim,” which Dylan claims to have adapted after being inspired by the version he’d heard on an old Doc Watson album.

Wilentz: “Having first listened to Dylan sing ‘Lone Pilgrim’ when my father fell ill in 1994, and then over and over during the months after he died, his rendering still brings solace that came from the last place, and the last performer, I’d have expected it from. I have always been struck by the last two lines and the very last word, which is also the last word on World Gone Wrong: ‘The same hand that led me through scenes most severe/Has kindly assisted me home.’. For that performance — of a song that few except for Dylan’s most passionate fans remember — I will always feel a gratitude that is completely personal. But all of that aside, it is clear that with ‘Lone Pilgrim’ and World Gone Wrong, Dylan had reached the end of the beginning of his own artistic reawakening and, assisted by the kind Master, had reached a place that at least felt more like home.”

The chapter on Dylan’s recording of “Lone Pilgrim” is the second of two devoted to a period during the early to mid-1990s, in which Dylan had decided to take a break in order to, once again, reassess his musical career. The chapter tells the basic history of  The Sacred Harp, and how it grew out of the shape-note (or fasola) singing that began in New England before the American Revolution, and became especially popular in the uplands South before the Civil War. It starts with the curious story of William Walker and Benjamin Franklin White, whose musical enterprise and rivalry created two of the most successful hymnals in American history, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion and The Sacred Harp.

Wilentz also delves into the relationship Dylan had with another contemporary sixties figure,  Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and the chapter “Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beat Generation” is one of the book’s best. Wilentz describes how a meeting between the two counter-culture figures actually took place in Wilentz’s uncle’s apartment above the bookshop, sometime in late 1963. By this time, Ginsberg’s Beat scene was already in decline, and Dylan was trying to figure out what he wanted to do next. Soon enough he would be writing “My Back Pages” and “Chimes of Freedom,” while Ginsberg was already enjoying belated recognition as a key influence on the emerging hippie youth culture, and admittedly influenced Dylan at his sixties peak.

Wilentz describes a scene depicted in D.A. Pennebaker’s great cinéma verité documentary of Dylan’s tour of England, Don’t Look Back, in which Ginsberg appeared in Dylan’s hotel room in the Savoy Hotel, in 1965, where he read aloud to Dylan a poem about the experience he’d just had, entitled “Kral Majales,” that he’d written on his flight from Prague to London. Dylan was no doubt the first person ever to hear the poem, which tells the story of how Ginsberg had been invited to Prague to participate in a student festival that the Communists had been suppressing for twenty years, only to be kicked out of the country a day later for what authorities were calling “immoral behavior.”

The chapter on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue goes into great detail about how Dylan was inspired by the 1945 French film Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis), directed by Marcel Carné and set in Paris during the period of the July Monarchy (from 1830 to 1848). Les Enfants tells the story of a pantomime star, Baptiste Debureau (played by Jean-Louis Barrault), and his complicated relationship with a beautiful courtesan named Garance (played by Arletty). The Rolling Thunder chapter explores some of the possible connections to the film, including Dylan appearing in whiteface during the Rolling Thunder tour, which is how Barrault often appears in the film. Wilentz also explores the influence of the art film on Dylan’s own four-hour art movie, Renaldo and Clara, which contains footage filmed during the tour.

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton University, is the author or editor of seven books, including Chants Democratic, The Rise of American Democracy, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and other publications. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.