American Fool: The Roots and Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp

by Martin Torgoff

Profiles the Indiana-born rock star whose down-to-earth lyrics and hard rock sound have made him a hero of working-class America

Genres: Music, Biography, Nonfiction

222 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

For more than three decades, Martin Torgoff has been at the forefront of major media trends and cultural currents, documenting and telling the story of America through the evolution of its popular culture. An award-winning journalist, author of prize-winning and best-selling books, documentary filmmaker and Emmy-nominated television writer, director and producer of shows that have been seen by millions, his work has encompassed music, art, film, theater, literature, politics, history, biography, sexuality, sports, sociology, and celebrity culture. As the New Yorker put it, “Martin Torgoff has been writing books and making films about sex, drugs and rock and roll for thirty years.”

Although an expert on the cultural landscape of the baby boom era, Torgoff’s interests range far and wide. His film Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hop and the Crack Generation, produced for VH1, was nominated for Emmys in Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming and Outstanding Achievement in a Craft: Writing. In 2004, he published a landmark work about how illicit drugs have shaped American popular culture, Can’t Find My Way Home: America In the Great Stoned Age, 1945 - 2000 (Simon & Schuster), then turned the book into The Drug Years, an award-winning multi-part documentary series in 2006 that became one of the most successful in the history of VH1. This and another series on the sexual revolution called Sex—The Revolution, a co-production of VH1 and Sundance in which Torgoff also appeared as a principal commentator, established him as a recognized television personality and authority on music and American pop culture, after which he was invited to lecture at Brown University and other colleges.

Reviews

[David Ambrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always been a big John Mellencamp fan. It was good to (finally) read the story of his slow rise to stardom. I always knew that he had received a lot of chances, as he had three bad albums (Chestnut Street Incident, A Biography, The Kid Inside) before hitting it big with American Fool. The story of why he kept getting chances, and how success came about, was good to read. Unfortunately the book was written in 1986, before some of his best work (The Lonesome Jubilee, Big Daddy, and more). Still, I enjoyed reading this and getting the full story very much.