Grown-Up Anger

In this tour de force of storytelling, Daniel Wolff braids together three disparate strands-Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and a labor strike in northern Michigan-to create a devastating revisionist history of twentieth-century America.

At thirteen, when he first heard Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone,” Wolff recognized the sound of grown-up anger. When he later discovered “Song for Woody,” Dylan's tribute to Guthrie, Wolff fixed on it as a clue to a distinctive mix of rage and compassion. That clue led back to Guthrie's “1913 Massacre”-a memorial song about the horrific conclusion to a union Christmas party in Calumet, Michigan.

Following the trail from Dylan to Guthrie to a tragedy that claimed seventy-four lives, Wolff found himself tracing a century-long history of anger. From America's early industrialized days up to the present, the battle over economic justice keeps resurfacing: on a freight car in California, on a joyride through New Orleans, in a snowy field in Michigan. At the stunning conclusion-as the mysteries of Dylan, Guthrie, and the 1913 tragedy connect-the reader discovers a larger story, purposely distorted and buried in time.

Daniel Wolf's Grown-Up Anger chronicles the struggles between the haves and the have-nots, the battle to organize American workers, and the way two musicians used their fury to illuminate injustice and spark hope.