In May 2001 Bob Dylan will be sixty years old. Ten years ago, Clinton Heylin published his groundbreaking biography of the man. Behind the Shades, which The New Yorker recently singled out as "the most readable and reliable" of all Dylan biographies.
This new, updated version has been completely rewritten from the bottom up, is significantly enlarged, and takes into account not only the last tumultuous decade of Dylan's life, but an additional decade of research by the author. The result is the definitive biography of the man many argue is the singular figure in twentieth-century popular culture.
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited follows Dylan along one of the most extraordinary and daring paths ever taken by a performing artist:
his awkward childhood in Minnesota
his arrival in New York and rise as the unwitting leader of a political folk revolution
his controversial move toward electric rock
the spooky and uniquely American Basement Tapes
his forays into country-western music the lost albums of the eighties his paranoia, addiction, and seclusion
his reemergence after a near-fatal 1997 heart infection with the triple Grammy Award-winning Time Out of Mind
the endless touring life
the hundreds of timeless songs that have become a part of American and worldwide consciousness

Most biographies of Bob Dylan are mired in the sixties, but Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited is the only one that gives equal weight to all the extraordinary phases of Dylan's forty-year career.
As ever, Dylan remains an endlessly fascinating, mysterious, and obsessively private man. For years he has managed to keep much of his personal life a secret, and Clinton Heylin, Dylan's most prolific chronicler, remains the first biographer to give the world a true sense of what drives, inspires, influences, and shapes the man behind the music, the man behind the shades.