After the Flood - Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career 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 and biographer 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.

About the author

Robert Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation from 2013 to 2015. He was the founding director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School. For his book Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, Polito was awarded the National Books Critics Circle Award in Biography.

Product details

• Authors: Robert Polito
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 27.01.2026
• EAN: 9780871402936
• ISBN: 978-0-87140-293-6
• Illustrations: 1 image
• Series: Liveright
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Monographs; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment & Performing Arts, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Folk & Traditional, Biography: arts & entertainment, Folk & traditional music, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Music, Biography: arts and entertainment, Folk, Folkloric styles, Traditional and folk music