Bob Dylan in America, a new book by the historian Sean Wilentz, will be published in September. The following excerpt is Chapter 2 of the book.

Once I went to a movie
At midnight, 1940, Mice
And Men, the name of it,
The Red Block Boxcars
Rolling by (on the Screen)
Yessir
life
finally
gets
tired
of
living—

Twenty years after Kerouac wrote those lines, on a crisp scarlet-ocher November afternoon at Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visited Kerouac’s grave, trailed by a reporter, a photographer, a film crew, and various others (including the young playwright Sam Shepard). Dylan had performed the night before at the University of Lowell, on a tour of New England with a thrown-together troupe of new friends and old, including Ginsberg, which called itself the Rolling Thunder Revue. Ginsberg, who became excited when the tour buses reached the city, met up with some of Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies and tried to immerse Dylan’s entourage in Kerouacian lore. Shepard, who had joined the troupe ostensibly to write the screenplay for a movie Dylan planned to make of the tour, duly recorded in his travel log the names of real-life Lowell sites described in the Duluoz Legend—Kerouac’s collective, Faulknerian name for the autobiographical novels, revolving around his fictional alter ego Jack Duluoz, that constituted the main body of his work.

But at Edson Cemetery, Ginsberg recited not from Kerouac’s prose but from poetry out of Mexico City Blues, including “54th Chorus”— invoking specters, fatigue, mortality, Mexico, and John Steinbeck’s boxcar America, while he and Dylan contemplated Kerouac’s headstone. And when Dylan included footage of the event in the film he made in and about the Rolling Thunder tour, yet another complicated cultural circuit closed, linking Kerouac listening to Copland and watching Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in 1940 with the scene at Kerouac’s grave in Renaldo and Clara in 1977.

Read the whole chapter on www.newyorker.com

Also read the series History Through Dylan on this blog.

Photograph: Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, Bob Dylan, and Daniel Kramer backstage at McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, September, 1964. © Daniel Kramer.