Most Popular Books by David Hajdu

The Untold Story of the 1960s Folk Scene That Launched Bob Dylan and Joan Baez Positively Fourth Street is the captivating story of how four young bohemians - Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez, and Richard Farina - converged in Greenwich Village, fell into love, and invented a sound and style that became one of the most enduring legacies of the 1960s. Author David Hajdu, acclaimed for his biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, vividly captures the emergence of folk music from cult practice to popular art form through the colorful lives of this influential foursome. The narrative unfolds from the Baez family home in suburban Boston to the vibrant folk scenes of Cambridge and Minneapolis, where a young Robert Zimmerman reinvented himself as Bob Dylan. Hajdu reveals surprising details and never-before-told stories, shedding new light on Dylan''s early years and his rise as a protest singer and countercultural icon. With its fresh perspective on a defining era, Positively Fourth Street offers an illuminating look at the 1960s before they became "the Sixties." Hajdu''s engaging prose and meticulous research make this a must-read for music fans, history buffs, and anyone fascinated by the power of creativity and the spirit of an age.

Lush Life, David Hajdu''s sensitive and moving biography of Strayhorn, is a corrective to decades of patchwork scholarship and journalism about this giant of jazz. It is also a vibrant, absorbing account of the "lush life" led by Strayhorn and other jazz musicians in Harlem and Paris. A musical prodigy who began a career as a composer while still a teenager in Pittsburgh, Strayhorn came to New York City at Duke Ellington''s invitation in 1939; soon afterward he wrote "''A'' Train," which became the signature song of the Ellington Orchestra, one of the most popular jazz bands in the country.

A personal, idiosyncratic history of pop music traces the sheet-music era at the end of the nineteenth century and the invention of records through favorite chart-topping songs and the ways his mother shaped him as an aficionado.

In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, the popular culture of today was invented in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content. Esteemed critic David Hajdu vividly evokes the rise, fall, and rise again of comics in this engrossing history. "Marvelous . . . a staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it....Hajdu’s important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil."--Jennifer Reese,Entertainment Weekly(Grade: A-) "Incisive and entertaining . . . This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination."--Janet Maslin,The New York Times "A well-written, detailed book . . . Hajdu’s research is impressive."--Bob Minzesheimer,USA Today "Crammed with interviews and original research, Hajdu’s book is a sprawling cultural history of comic books."--Matthew Price,Newsday "To those who think rock ''n'' roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page ofThe Ten-Cent Plagueevinces [Hajdu’s] zest for the ''aesthetic lawlessness'' of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them. Comic books have grown up, but Hajdu’s affectionate portrait of their rowdy adolescence will make readers hope they never lose their impudent edge."--Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune "A vivid and engaging book."--Louis Menand,The New Yorker "David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books inThe Ten-Cent Plague." --GQ "Sharp . . . lively . . . entertaining and erudite . . . David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America’s early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment."--R. C. Baker,The Village Voice "Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds, and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock ''n'' roll era."--Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times "A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century."--Michael Saler,The Times Literary Supplement(London) David Hajdu is the author ofLush Life: A Biography of Billy StrayhornandPositively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.

One of Literary Hub''s Most Anticipated Books of 2025 An acclaimed critic, journalist, and songwriter-musician tells the story of art’s relation to machines, from the Baroque period to the age of AI. What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture. From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition—along with the condition of living with machines—through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art—and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching.” With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it—and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.

This never-before-told story of the life and work of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon is "a revealing—and at times hilarious—satire of the music business, fame, and the cult of personality" (Clea Simon, Boston Globe). Adrianne Geffel was a genius. Praised as the "Geyser of Grand Street" and the "Queen of Bleak Chic," she was a one-of-a-kind artist, a pianist and composer with a rare neurological condition that enabled her to make music that was nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. She and her sensibility are now fully integrated into the cultural lexicon; her music has been portrayed, represented, and appropriated endlessly in popular culture. But what do we really know about her? Despite her renown, Adrianne Geffel vanished from public life, and her whereabouts remain a mystery to this day. David Hajdu cuts through the noise to tell, for the first time, the full story of Geffel''s life and work, piecing it together through the memories of those who knew her, inspired her, and exploited her—her parents, teachers, best friend, manager, critics, and lovers. Adrianne Geffel made music so strange, so compelling, so utterly unique that it is simply not to be believed. Hajdu has us believing every note of it in this slyly entertaining work of fiction. A brilliantly funny satire, with characters that leap off the page, Adrianne Geffel is a vividly twisted evocation of the New York City avant-garde of the 1970s and ''80s, and a strangely moving portrait of a world both utterly familiar and like none we''ve ever encountered.

Winner - 2022 Deems Taylor / Virgil Thomson Book Awards in Pop from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape. A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world. This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.

The sounds, styles, and lives of outstanding singers from the 1920s to the present, are "written about with loving expertise by two writers who can make singers and their songs live on paper," says Clive Barnes. Features revealing biographies, critical assessments, and selective discographies and videographies.

Heroes and Villains is the first collection of essays by David Hajdu'' award - winning author of The Ten - Cent Plague'' Positively 4th Street'' and Lush Life. Eclectic and controversial'' Hajdu''s essays take on topics as varied as pop music'' jazz'' th...

For more than thirty years, David Hajdu has been a leading critic, casting light on artists past and present and on culture high and low. The Night Before is a collection of his writing on music, comics, and popular culture, in which he brings historical perspective and a keen critical sensibility to unraveling underappreciated or misunderstood works. These essays encompass an extraordinarily wide range of artists—from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish—and themes, from the wails for racial justice by the “blues queens” of the 1920s to the role of new technologies in the making of twenty-first-century pop hits. In piercing but lively prose, Hajdu explores how women singers of three generations upended gendered expectations. With insatiable curiosity, he tackles topics from Bulgarian folk music to the cartoons of Roz Chast, and from the racially mixed roots of country music to the unhinged comic strip that foreshadowed Peanuts. Turning inward, Hajdu reflects on subjects such as his fascination with the Hudson River, whose waters flow in both directions. The Night Before reveals how the currents of art and culture run forward and backward too, uniting past, present, and future in a ceaseless conversation.