Photograph: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and Daniel Kramer backstage at McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, September, 1964. © Daniel Kramer.
“Bob Dylan, The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America” – The New Yorker has printed an excerpt from Sean Wilentz‘ forthcoming Bob Dylan in America, (Chapter 2, “Penetrating Aether: The Beat Generation and Allen Ginsberg’s America”) due out next month & published by Doubleday.
Sean’s father Eli, and uncle, Ted, ran the Eighth Street Bookshop on West 8th Street and MacDougal Street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where Allen & Peter stayed briefly after returning from three years of travel around the world, which is also where Allen met Bob Dylan for the first time. Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton University where he’s taught since 1979.
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross does a quick Q&A with Wilentz this week in the New Yorker as well
New York Magazine are also giving Wilentz pretty decent props
And.. for those of you in the NYC area, Wilentz will be reading and signing his book, Tuesday, September 7 at Spoonbill & Sugartown Books in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 7pm.