He’s avoided doing interviews: “I’d rather sacrifice two or three really cool anecdotes and keep my own position a little bit more dispassionate.

1, the first part of his memoirs, Wilentz decided to take a whack at his own book-but from a scholarly perspective. Around the time Dylan released Chronicles, Vol. “I started making friends in Dylan’s office,” says Wilentz, who gave himself the tongue-in-cheek title of “historian-in-residence” for the website. It was Eli’s death that eventually led to Wilentz’s entry into what he calls “Dylan World.” He wrote a piece for Dissent on coping with his grief by listening to Dylan’s 1993 cover of “Lone Pilgrim.” In 2001, Wilentz got a call from someone working on Dylan’s website, asking him to write an essay on the album “ Love and Theft,” released on September 11 of that year. The apartment where Dylan met Ginsberg was just over the 8th Street Bookshop, which Wilentz’s father, Eli, owned and ran from 1947 to 1979. Bob Dylan in America may be an unusually rigorous Dylan book, but “it was easier to do than the others,” he says, “because in effect I’ve been doing the research all my life.” I don’t mean to be mystical or spooky, but if you know what’s going on, you can’t help but feel it.” Although Wilentz has done plenty of journalism, the Dylan book is a departure from his hardbound oeuvre, which includes a 1,100-page tome on American democracy and biographies of Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. “Dylan talks about walking around here and thinking that it really is 1880.

“This whole neighborhood has such a long history that there is a sense-for some of us, anyway-of revenants, of ghosts,” says Wilentz, better-heeled than your average tour guide, in Brooks Brothers and custom-made shoes. We visit the singer’s former apartment on West 4th Street, above what’s now a sex shop the clubs he played along Macdougal Street the building where he first encountered Allen Ginsberg. Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor and author of Bob Dylan in America, has agreed to lead a tour of Dylan’s Greenwich Village, a place he knows better than any other.

Sean wilentz dylan