Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation

by Philip Norman

The classic chronicle of the Beatles--their music, their lives, their times

From their primitive first chords to the huge success of the Beatles Anthology, the Beatles have been an integral part of our culture and our consciousness for over thirty-five years. Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation tells the extraordinary story of the rise of four scruffy boys from Liverpool to beings more adored, more influential--and in many ways more troubled--than any in the history of popular entertainment. It is also a penetrating social history of our time, based on an incredible wealth of material--eyewitness accounts, interviews, stories withheld from the press and public--that was available exclusively to the author.

Rich in detail, anecdotes, and background, with 100 stunning photographs, Shout! takes us from the wild, often comical days at the beginning in Liverpool to the life and death of Stu Sutcliffe, the brilliant boy known as the "fifth Beatle"; from the psychedelic triumph of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to the band's embrace of Indian music and spirituality; from the brilliantly unified sounds of Abbey Road to Paul's desperate attempts to form a final comeback concert.

Riveting, enlightening, heartbreaking, Shout! is a true epic.

"The definitive biography." --The New York Times Book Review

Philip Norman is a journalist and a novelist who in 1968 was assigned to cover the Beatles' own business utopia, Apple Corps, from the inside. He is the author of Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly and many other books.