Robert Polito discusses 'After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace'
Robert Polito challenges the Dylan 'decline' narrative, revealing his later work as his most ambitious — in conversation with Amanda Petrusich.
Why we picked this
If your greatest dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life? Polito's answer — drawn from thousands of pages of archival material — is that Dylan's late period is actually his most daring.
The standard Dylan narrative peaks in the 1960s and trails off into irrelevance. Robert Polito’s new book makes the opposite case: that Dylan’s later work — weaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War — represents the most ambitious chapter of a career defined by reinvention.
Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, Polito traces how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has been consistently underestimated by critics and fans alike. The result is a reappraisal that asks fundamental questions about creativity, legacy, and what it means to keep working after you’ve already changed the world.
Polito is joined by The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich for a sharp, well-informed conversation about music, myth, and the art of the long game. Free and open to the public.