The first version of this seminal study was published in 1971, when writing a scholarly text on a pop culture subject was still considered as bordering on the vulgar. Now that cultural studies criticism is in full swing and books on Dylan fill entire shelves, Gray's work stands as the pioneering classic. It's not a biography but a careful and thoroughgoing analysis of Dylan's lyrical output and an intellectual tour-de-force. For this third and last edition Gray has added no less than 600 new pages, tracing Dylan's artistic development since the early eighties. There's a terrific chapter called "Even Post-Structuralists Oughta Have the Pre-War Blues," examining the enormous extent to which Dylan incorporated and transformed elements of early country blues throughout his career. There's also an entire chapter on "Blind Willie McTell." The degree of research and scholarship in this book is insane, and it's essential as a storehouse of knowledge on folk, country and blues records.