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Greil Marcus has been called "simply peerless, not only as a rock writer but as a cultural historian" (Nick Hornby). It's appropriate, then, that he should choose to explore one of the most defining moments in American music: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

It was 1967--the Summer of Love. Bob Dylan and five other musicians (later known as The Band) met in a bungalow in Woodstock, New York, and wrote and produced music that ignored the psychedelic sounds of the time, songs that would eventually become known simply as "The Basement Tapes." The group mined the history of American music and their own talents to produce legendary tracks that were bootleg issues before appearing in official release.

That is the alchemy that was practiced in the Basement Tapes laboratory, and "in that alchemy," Marcus writes, "is an undiscovered country, like the purloined letter hiding in plain sight." Marcus explores this music and the cauldron of the American experience in which it was formed in a book that illuminates America, then and now.

Greil Marcus (born 1945) is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.

Marcus was born in San Francisco. He earned an undergraduate degree in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, where he also did graduate work in political science. He has been a rock critic and columnist for Rolling Stone magazine (where he was the first reviews editor, at $30 a week) and other publications, including Creem, the Village Voice and Artforum.

His 1975 book, Mystery Train, re-defined the parameters of rock music criticism. The book places rock 'n'roll within the context of American cultural archetypes, from Moby-Dick to Jay Gatsby to Stagger Lee. Marcus's "recognition of the unities in the American imagination that already exist" inspired countless rock scribes

His next book, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989, developed from an earlier essay), stretched his trademark riffing across a century of Western civilization. Positing punk rock as a transhistorical cultural phenomenon, Marcus examined philosophical connections between entities as diverse as the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, and medieval heretics. From 1983 to 1989, Marcus was on the Board of Directors for the National Book Critics Circle.

In 1991, Marcus published Dead Elvis, a collection of writings about Elvis Presley, and in 1993 published Ranters and Crowd Pleasers, an examination of post-punk political pop. In 1997, using old Dylan bootlegs as a starting point, Marcus dissected the American subconscious with Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes.

He currently writes the "Elephant Dancing" column for Interview, "Real Life Top 10" for Believer and occasionally teaches graduate courses in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy in the American Voice, was recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.