Read more
In this tour de force of storytelling, Daniel Wolff braids together three disparate strands—Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and a labor strike in northern Michigan—to create a devastating revisionist history of twentieth-century America.
At thirteen, when he first heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” Wolff recognized the sound of grown-up anger. When he later discovered “Song for Woody,” Dylan’s tribute to Guthrie, Wolff fixed on it as a clue to a distinctive mix of rage and compassion. That clue led back to Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”—a memorial song about the horrific conclusion to a union Christmas party in Calumet, Michigan.
Following the trail from Dylan to Guthrie to a tragedy that claimed seventy-four lives, Wolff found himself tracing a century-long history of anger. From America’s early industrialized days up to the present, the battle over economic justice keeps resurfacing: on a freight car in California, on a joyride through New Orleans, in a snowy field in Michigan. At the stunning conclusion—as the mysteries of Dylan, Guthrie, and the 1913 tragedy connect—the reader discovers a larger story, purposely distorted and buried in time.
Daniel Wolf’s Grown-Up Anger chronicles the struggles between the haves and the have-nots, the battle to organize American workers, and the way two musicians used their fury to illuminate injustice and spark hope.
About the author
Daniel Wolff is the author of The Fight for Home; How Lincoln Learned to Read; 4th of July/Asbury Park; and You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He’s been nominated for a Grammy, published three collections of poetry, and collaborated with, among others, songwriters, documentary filmmakers, photographers, and choreographer Marta Renzi, his wife.
Additional text
“…Wolff provides a primer on the complicated history of anger, political and personal, in American music, one that’s never been more needed than it is today. There aren’t many cultural histories that read like they’ve been written for activists and fans. Grown-Up Anger moves to the head of that list.”
