Sean Wilentz is one of the nation’s most prominent historians. His books and commentary on music, politics, and the arts have gained a wide reputation for their force, originality, and elegance.
Wilentz was born and raised in New York City. His family owned the famed 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, where as a boy and young teenager he was immersed in the currents of beat literature and folk singing that would profoundly change the nation’s culture — and the world’s. (Allen Ginsberg first met Bob Dylan in his uncle’s apartment above the shop, a fateful encounter in the lives and writing of both artists.) It is out of this formative experience that Wilentz writes about the music and literature of that time and its legacies.
Sean Wilentz is currently the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. The winner of the Cotsen Family Distinguished Teaching Fellowship at Princeton (1993), he has also received numerous research awards, including fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is spending the academic year 2010-11 as the Times Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Courtesy of Seanwilentz.com