Tom Piazza

"It is 1883 and America is at a crossroads. The Civil War is nearly twenty years in the past, Reconstruction has been crushed in the South, and the Gilded Age is bringing unprecedented prosperity to some, along with radical social and class conflicts. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist...

"Several years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist. Their destination? Tulsa, Oklahoma. The documents, as essential as they are intriguing--draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera-- comprise one of the most important cultural archives in the modern world. Along with countless still and moving images and thousands of hours of riveting studio and live recordings, this priceless collection...