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Last Train to Memphis

The Rise of Elvis Presley

Last Train to Memphis Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Peter Guralnick

Formats and Prices

On Sale
Oct 3, 1994
Page Count
576 pages
Publisher
Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13
9780316332200

Price

$40.00

Price

$50.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $40.00 $50.00 CAD
  2. ebook $11.99 $16.99 CAD
  3. Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
  4. Trade Paperback $24.99 $30.99 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around October 3, 1994. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis’ humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated.
 
“Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others.” –Bob Dylan
 
From the moment that he first shook up the world in the mid 1950s, Elvis Presley has been one of the most vivid and enduring myths of American culture.

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley is the first biography to go past that myth and present an Elvis beyond the legend. Based on hundreds of interviews and nearly a decade of research, it traces the evolution not just of the man but of the music and of the culture he left utterly transformed, creating a completely fresh portrait of Elvis and his world.

This volume tracks the first twenty-four years of Elvis’ life, covering his childhood, the stunning first recordings at Sun Records (“That’s All Right,” “Mystery Train”), and the early RCA hits (“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel”). These were the years of his improbable self-invention and unprecedented triumphs, when it seemed that everything that Elvis tried succeeded wildly. There was scarcely a cloud in sight through this period until, in 1958, he was drafted into the army and his mother died shortly thereafter. The book closes on that somber and poignant note.

Last Train to Memphis takes us deep inside Elvis’ life, exploring his lifelong passion for music of every sort (from blues and gospel to Bing Crosby and Mario Lanza), his compelling affection for his family, and his intimate relationships with girlfriends, mentors, band members, professional associates, and friends. It shows us the loneliness, the trustfulness, the voracious appetite for experience, and above all the unshakable, almost mystical faith that Elvis had in himself and his music. Drawing frequently on Elvis’ own words and on the recollections of those closest to him, the book offers an emotional, complex portrait of young Elvis Presley with a depth and dimension that for the first time allow his extraordinary accomplishments to ring true.

Peter Guralnick has given us a previously unseen world, a rich panoply of people and events that illuminate an achievement, a place, and a time as never revealed before.
 
Billboard‘s 100 Greatest Music Books of All Time
Entertainment Weekly’s Book of the Year 1994
Entertainment Weekly’s Top Five Non-Fiction Books of the Decade
Entertainment Weekly’s 100 New Classics: Best Reads from 1983-2008
Parade’s 75 Best Books of the Last 75 Years
An Esquire Book of the Decade
A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award

Genre:

  • “Even the minor revelations are positively spellbinding....Mr. Guralnick's narrative is rendered with an intimate, restrained intensity eerily reminiscent of the plaintive tone of Presley's ballads, that tremulous yearning of America itself....Profound and moving...a triumph of biographical art.”
    Stephen Wright, New York Times Book Review
  • “Peter Guralnick has done the impossible: He has brought a freshness, an innocence, and a seriousness to the life of Elvis Presley....To accomplish this, he interviewed scores of people, plowed through the mini-industry of Presley publishing, and then wiped the slate clean: Guralnick gives us a life of Elvis as if it had never been told before, and in a sense, it hasn't, not this way.”
    Entertainment Weekly
  • "Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others."
    Bob Dylan
  • "Altogether splendid...It is the particular and spectacular achievement of Last Train to Memphis that it holds both the making of the history and the beginning of the myth in firm, simple, and compassionate focus."
    Jay Cocks, Time
  • “A landmark contribution to American cultural history that invites comparison with classic accounts of such American lives as Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King Jr.”
    New York Observer

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Peter Guralnick

About the Author

Peter Guralnick’s books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway, and Sweet Soul Music; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. Guralnick won a Grammy for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club, wrote and co-produced the documentary Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, and wrote the scripts for the Grammy-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. His 2015 book Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll was a finalist for the Plutarch Award for Best Biography of the Year, awarded by the Biographers International Organization. His most recent book is Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing.

 

 

Learn more about this author