Posted on Sep 10, 2010 Sean Wilentz on Bob Dylan? What's next -- David McCulloch on Bruce Springsteen? Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Rolling Stones? Garry Wills on Madonna? You have every right to pick up "Bob Dylan in America" with skepticism -- or at least you would if you didn't know how deep Wilentz's background in traditional American music goes. Given the seriousness and pretension with which so many rock critics write about their favorite artists, you might expect an academician to bury Dylan beneath mounds of stentorian prose. But Wilentz is no ordinary academic. For one thing, along with Greil Marcus, he edited "The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad." For another, he was practically born into the subject. His father, Elias, ran the legendary Eighth Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a store, he says, "that helped nurture the Beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the early 1960s." (Elias also edited "The Beat Scene," one of the earliest anthologies of Beat poetry.) Sean Wilentz is surely the least pompous and most accessible of great American historians, a writer who can make 600 pages on "The Age of Reagan" into beach reading. In his book on Dylan, he succeeds in casting the same analytical eye on a cultural icon that he did on political figures such as Jefferson and Jackson, and he does it with the enthusiasm of a fan. "There is plenty of fascinating commentary on Dylan's songs," he