After the Flood

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Blending biography and archival history, After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, “If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?”A prevailing narrative Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s in a haze of substance abuse, made arguably the worst music of his career, and was finally put to bed in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story.Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan’s output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era—interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.