Woody Guthrie: A Life

Product description A biography of the influential American folk singer, Woody Guthrie, who lived a life on the edge of tragedy but inspired a generation of songwriters, including Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Few artists have captured the American experience of their time as wholly as folk legend Woody Guthrie. Singer, songwriter, and political activist, Guthrie drew a lifetime of inspiration from his roots on the Oklahoma frontier in the years before the Great Depression. His music—scathingly funny songs and poignant folk ballads—made heard the unsung life of field hands, migrant workers, and union organizers, and showed it worthy of tribute. Though his career was tragically cut short by the onset of a degenerative disease that ravaged his mind and body, the legacy of his life and music had already made him an American cultural icon, and has resounded with every generation of musician and music lover since. In this definitive biography, Joe Klein, nationally renowned journalist and author of the bestselling novel Primary Colors, creates an unforgettable portrait of a man as gifted, restless, and complicated as the American landscape he came from. Praise for Woody Guthrie: A Life “One of the finest treatments of an American 20th-century performer ever written . . . Not merely a biography . . . it is a social history . . . written knowledgeably, in a brilliant style.” —San Francisco Examiner “A really great book.” —Bruce Springsteen Amazon.com Review Before he became Anonymous, author of the political novel Primary Colors, Joe Klein wrote this intelligent biography of America's legendary folksinger-activist. Klein's first book may not have created the fuss that Primary Colors did, but it attracted the attention of no less a celebrity than Bruce Springsteen, who used to cite it with respect during concerts before singing Guthrie's most famous lyric, "This Land Is Your Land." Klein's unearthing of two politically radical verses usually omitted from that song is just one instance of the solid research underpinning his vivid narrative of Guthrie's often tragic life (1912-67). Before Woody turned 15, his sister died in a fire and his mother was committed to an Oklahoma insane asylum with a mysterious disease he later learned he inherited; Klein's chilling description of Huntington's chorea is one of the book's strong points. Its heart is a full rendering of Guthrie's restless wanderings across Depression-era America, which fired his lifelong radicalism, and a scrupulously unsentimental account of Woody's oft-sentimentalized personality. He may have been a genius and a staunch advocate of the common people, but Guthrie was also a bad husband, neglectful father, and difficult friend, as Klein shows. He pays Woody's life and music the tribute of assuming they need no sanitizing, and this biography is all the more interesting because of it. --Wendy Smith Review “One of the finest treatments of an American 20th-century performer ever written . . . Not merely a biography . . . it is a social history . . . written knowledgeably, in a brilliant style.” —San Francisco Examiner “A really great book.” —Bruce Springsteen About the Author Joe Klein, a journalist for nearly three decades, is a political correspondent for Time magazine . In addition to Primary Colors, his previous books include Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam and Woody Guthrie: A Life. He has written articles and reviews for The New Republic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Life, and Rolling Stone.