Near the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II, a homeless Dust Bowl refugee named Woody Guthrie originally drafted "This Land Is Your Land" as an anthem that encompassed the tough realities of those dark times--and as a rebuttal to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." But the song that Guthrie despised had its own complexities. Irving Berlin had risen from homelessness before becoming America's most successful songwriter,...

A biography of Woody Guthrie, a singer who wrote over 3,000 folk songs and ballads as he traveled around the United States, including "This Land is Your Land" and "So Long It's Been Good to Know Yuh."

"Stadler revives Guthrie's story as a dramatic portrait understood more fully through the lens of disability and close relationships, as he faced setbacks including his daughter's death, an obscenity arrest, therapy in a sex deviance clinic, and repeated stays in mental wards"--

A tour de force of storytelling years in the making: a dual biography of two of the greatest songwriters, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, that is also a murder mystery and a history of labor relations and socialism, big business and greed in twentieth-century America--woven together in one epic saga that holds meaning for all working Americans today. When thirteen-year-old Daniel Wolff first heard Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," it ignited a life-long...