"John Mellencamp is not your typical rock star. Not only has he absorbed into his own work the influence of Faulkner, Williams, Steinbeck, and other such literary giants, but he himself could have stepped straight from the pages of any of their great American novels. A complex, colorful, and larger than life character, Mellencamp, like Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash before him, walks to the beat of his own drum. Or, as he told author and veteran music journalist Paul Rees: 'I just refuse to take shit off anyone.' [This book charts] the life of one of the most fascinating characters in all of American music"--