Greil Marcus | The New York Review of Books

Greil Marcus

Greil Marcus is the author of Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby, among other books. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America and with Sean Wilentz of The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad.

A Ride on the Velvet Underground

Revolving around Lou Reed and John Cale, Todd Haynes’s documentary on the avant-garde rock band is itself an art project in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

November 18, 2021

The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson

by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson

by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach, and with a foreword by Elijah Wald

Love in Vain: Robert Johnson, 1911–1938

by Mezzo and J.M. Dupont, translated from the French by Ivanka Hahnenberger

December 3, 2020 issue

How to Write About the Right: An Exchange

January 17, 2019 issue

The Brotherhood of Rock

“The Band had made, Robertson says, a brotherhood, and in the way that in the songs each man’s contribution shaded and jumped into every other’s, they acted out an ideal of democracy and equality.”

Testimony

by Robbie Robertson

March 23, 2017 issue