After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

by Robert Polito

Blending biography and archival history, After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, “If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?”


A prevailing narrative Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s in a haze of substance abuse, made arguably the worst music of his career, and was finally put to bed in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan’s concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story.


Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan’s output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era—interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.

Genres: Music

384 pages, Hardcover

Published January 27, 2026

About the author

Robert Polito (born 1951) is an American academic, critic and poet. He has been Director of the Writing Program at The New School since 1992. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson.

Reviews

[Brent Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the last year I have been listening to Bob Dylan like my life depended on it—usually around 1500 minutes a month. Last May I saw him in concert for the 4th time, in Spokane as part of the Outlaw Tour with Willie Nelson. A friend asked me recently what it was I liked about Dylan’s latest 6 albums, the focus of most of my current listening. I struggled to answer.

This book was just what I was looking for: an explanation of Dylan’s songwriting process as he reinvented himself yet again over the last 30 years. Dylan’s lyrics, so often mysterious, seem as familiar and inevitable as history. I could sense there was more there than was explained merely by his biography.

Polito’s book is best at illuminating the allusions and referents in Dylan lyrics. It is pretty dense and difficult at times, but in giving insight into Dylan’s encyclopedic knowledge of American experience and songcraft, Polito succeeds at helping me explain to my querying friend just why I firmly believe Dylan’s Nobel is richly deserved.

Not everyone will give this book 5 stars, but it scratched a very particular itch in this obsessive Dylan fan.

[Raul · Rating 1 out of 5]

I came for the promised "[imaginative] research" said to be "drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials" that this dylanologist insider accessed at the Tulsa archive. Instead, I was met early on with a pastiche of cut-and-pasted chunks from sources already familiar to any discerning Dylan fan--widely available biographies, interviews and magazine articles. To get to the promised insights drawn from the archives, I traversed pages filled with glaring errors that discredit many a reviewer's claims of academic or scholarly rigor in this volume. "Belmont Tench"? You mean BENMONT Tench of the Heartbreakers? And in 1991, George W. Bush was not president nor did he enter into a conflict with Iraq over Kuwait--you mean, George H. W. Bush, his father? And who was Clyde McFadder? You mean the singer Clyde MCPHATTER?

Here, I thought I'd pass on the book altogether when encountering these early on--as one Amazon reviewer claims to have done--but I skimmed/speedread ahead and did find some interesting, worthy analysis in the discussions about the albums Modern Times and Tempest, verging on Scott Warmuth territory, which hopefully will be the subject of its own book some day by Warmuth himself.

Otherwise, the book often reads like a bloated post on an Expecting Rain forum or a fan concert review on Bill Pagel's Bob Dates site. I enjoy reading those from time to time, in small doses, but I expected more from a book that promised far more than just one informed fan's opinions of what he likes or thinks of Dylan's work. Too many sentences with "I think," "I guess," or "my favorite song/concert/recording/etc. is probably..." for this book to be considered as serious academic work on Dylan. And the abecedarium chapter organization does not help, giving the book a very fragmented, scattershot feel that makes following the author's main thesis a difficult challenge, seemingly even to himself: one chapter begins—I kid you not—with the question "Where were we?" Exactly.

Organizing the chapters by alphabetical letters also creates so much repetition--how many descriptions and explanations of Theme Time Radio Hour can one Dylan fan take?--weighted down by so many long lists that occupy long paragraphs, some times pages: album track lists, concert dates, live playlists, recordings... One whole chapter is itself a list of quotes without commentary, including a quote by...ChatGPT. WTF. WTF, indeed...

I did find one sentence close to the end of the book that encapsulates many of my problems with it. It features the "I'm guessing" opinionated tone, repeats the word "already" (kind of ironic) and reveals there is no rigor here in the editing or proofreading. Here it goes, verbatim, from the U chapter: “Part of the snag in The Nobel Lecture, I’m guessing, is that he already had already delivered that retrospective address, touching on the legacies that informed his own creative practices, with his MusiCares speech the previous year. ”

That's all.

[Lorren · Rating 3 out of 5]

AFTER THE FLOOD is well-researched and crammed with information about the second half of Bob Dylan’s career. I welcomed the view into a legendary artist’s later life—how often do we focus on only the beginnings? However, I think the book was attempting a bit too much. The abcedarian structure left me disoriented at times. The author occasionally veered into his personal experiences, which I enjoyed, but it was rare enough that it felt a bit random when the vignettes came up. Maybe someone who is better-versed in Dylan lore would love this full immersion, but for me, as a newcomer, it was too much of a firehose.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[Ward Whipple · Rating 3 out of 5]

This intensely detailed overview of the most recent 35 years of Bob Dylan's career is chock full of literary attributions and references to individual song performances out of the thousands of concerts the man played over that period. Familiarity with both may be the best way to appreciate this work. Personally, I was surprised the author didn't mention the obvious (to me, anyway) precursor of "Matty Groves" in "Tin Angel", and while the personal details, such as the author's illness during the writing of the book, are unnecessary for a biography, they were minimal. (Thanks to NetGalley for the advance proof.)

[William Dury · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a big fan of Mr Polito’s Jim Thompson book, and now this one as well. Uncle Bob played 3,000 concerts between 1991 and 2024 (!)* and this book concentrates on that time frame, analyzing and reviewing recordings and concerts from that era. The subtitle (“Memory Palace”) is apt, as a couple of people mention Dylan as having an astonishing, even freakish memory. Somehow not surprising.

Mr Polito does an astonishing job himself, finding Homer, Ovid and Roman history elements in the more recent recordings. The reader puzzling over extensive War of 1812 references in “Tempest” might feel he’s stayed a little too long at the party. When a reviewer asks Bob if “Tempest” is a reference to the Shakespeare play, he replies, “No, that was ‘THE Tempest.’ Totally different.” Good old Bob.

Concert song analysis are abundant, sincere, and quite good. Jim Thompson and Bob Dylan. That’s the good stuff, right there. Well done.

—————
*The Grateful Dead are generally credited with 2,350 and The Rolling Stones claimed 2,000 in 2006.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book on Bob Dylan written by anyone in the 21st century. The concept is novel: It focuses entirely on his output since he won the Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 1991 (i.e., the point where most other Dylan books are beginning to wind up). It is also the first book to take the kind of research done by the likes of Scott Warmuth, which assiduously tracks the relentless use of references and quotations in Dylan's recent work (not only in his songs but in his memoir Chronicles and in the screenplay for Masked and Anonymous), and use it as a jumping off point for substantial analysis. I loved every page.

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Polito provides a talmudic examination of Dylan's expansive career since 1991 in abecedarian sequence. It’s not for the casual fan or even a curious fan. This is a serious study of Dylan’s wonderful and remarkable second 30 years in show business. It will certainly be quoted in the myriad biographies to come, which might’ve been on Polito’s mind as he sneaks in some biography of his own to coattails Dylan into eternity

[Carly Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gave me more appreciation for Bob Dylan's later work (1990s - present). The author presents the topics in the form of an abecedary and jumps around from topic to topic. I found it easier to read it as short essays rather than a straight forward narrative nonfiction account.