There is a great irony to a Bob Dylan biography: how can you write about the life of a person who doesn’t exist? (Oh, no, not this postmodernist nonsense again!) Dylan is a creation of Robert Zimmerman’s and the United States’ imagination, which is to say, he is part of the American trope of public self-reinvention.
It’s not paradoxical to state that Dylan becomes more himself when adopting various vocal masks—in other words, an all-American thespian, who holds fate in his blue eyes. Yes, he is a shapeshifting figure, a coyote, after all. We cannot get enough of this growing yarn—or escape it.
For a preeminent cultural figure, Bob Dylan still lacks a major biography. “Two early ones, by Robert Shelton and Anthony Scaduto, are filled with the juicy fruits of access, and Clinton Heylin’s Behind the Shades is a work of heavy industry,” David Remnick writes in his 2022 article for The New Yorker, entitled “A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan”. “But none of them are quite worthy of the subject on a musical or historical level—there’s nothing comparable to, say, Peter Guralnick’s two volumes on Elvis Presley or Maynard Solomon’s life of Mozart.”
The solution? Perhaps the answer lies in the wife-and-husband writing team Peter Ames Carlin and Claire Dederer, who have announced that they are writing a biography of Dylan.
Scott Peeples, Professor of English at the College of Charleston, SC—whose previous books include The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2004) and The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (2020)—has taken up the almost insurmountable challenge to write a biography of Bob Dylan with How Many Roads: A Life of Bob Dylan. For certain, the book isn’t aimed to be the definitive biography that Remnick posits, and, for that matter, isn’t voluminous.
How Many Roads reiterates the established Bob Dylan tale; the one you know so well it could be your own life story, or, more accurately, it is as if Dylan’s life has been passed down from generation to generation like a folk song. As the title implies, Dylan has, be it literally or figuratively, walked many roads. Despite this, biographers have a predilection to travel down one road, which is also the one Peeples journeys along.
For the most part, How Many Roads is not revelatory. That said, Peeples spent time at the Bob Dylan Center, incorporating information from the Bob Dylan Archive into the book. For instance, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan attempted to co-write a song during their 1999 tour, as detailed in a 2010 handwritten note.
If you have never read any literature on Dylan, How Many Roads is a solid introduction with enough analytical sharpness to keep seasoned fans invested, bolstered by brisk, clear prose. Moreover, it is along the lines of the British journalist Nigel Williamson’s 2004 book, Bob Dylan Dead Straight Guide—though with more depth and compelling takes. Refreshingly, Peeples’ work does not get mired in personal issues; rather, the primary focus is on music.
Peeples isn’t afraid to highlight Dylan’s questionable decisions, artistically or personally. This is no hagiography. Although the author is fastidious in his research, there is one glaring mistake: he identifies the uncredited Newsweek reporter—who ran an exposé of Dylan’s middle-class Jewish heritage right after his famous concert at Carnegie Hall in October 1963—as Dick Schaap. However, Dylan biographer and archivist Clinton Heylin identifies them as Andrea Svedberg.
The structure of How Many Roads is disappointingly predictable and lopsided; by the time you get to 1993—which, because of the longevity of Dylan’s life as a musician, is not even halfway into his recording career—you are on page 283 of 324. The strength of the book lies in Peeples’ literary erudition and analysis, especially in paragraphs where he frames Dylan’s lyrics through an American literary lens. Therefore, figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson are all namechecked; specifically, Peeples postulates Whitman’s influence in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”.
Brilliant ideas are scattered throughout this fast-moving book. Peeples draws parallels between “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and Cole Porter‘s breakup song “Just One of Those Things”. Furthermore, Peeples’ acuity shines through his metatextual connections, such as viewing “If You See Her, Say Hello” as an updated “Girl from the North Country”.
When writing about “Blind Willie McTell”, Peeples impressively begins by musing on the American poet Robert Hayden’s “Homage to the Empress of the Blues”, a poem honoring African-American blues singer Bessie Smith. Additionally, Peeples cleverly zeroes in on Ricky Nelson’s “Garden Party”, which, although not mentioned, Dylan would cover for the first and only time at the Outlaw Music Festival tour in 2025 in San Diego.
Although How Many Roads isn’t an essential Dylan biography, not all books have to be necessary to be effective and rewarding, which is exactly what Peeples’ text reflects. As previously stated, there is more depth here than usually found in paint-by-numbers Dylan biographies, while offering a concise, more rounded view of Dylan as an artist rather than trying to understand the person behind the masks.
One is left with the feeling, though, that Peeples could have written a fascinating book on the intertextuality between Bob Dylan and Edgar Allan Poe. Or a book contextualizing Dylan within the American literary tradition. We wait to see if Peeples ever returns from the road with a coyote and a raven in tow.