Greil Marcus once said to an interviewer, -There is an infinite amount of meaning about anything, and I free associate.- For more than four decades, Marcus has explored the connections among figures, sounds, and events in culture, relating unrelated points of departure, mapping alternate histories and surprising correspondences. He is a unique and influential voice in American letters.

Marcus was born in 1945 in San Francisco. In 1968 he published his first piece, a review of Magic Bus: The Who on Tour, in Rolling Stone, where he became the magazine's first records editor....