Ray Robertson is the author of the novels Home Movies, Heroes, What Happened Later, David, Moody Food and Gently Down the Stream, the latter two of which were voted Best Books of The Year by the Globe and Mail. Past non-fiction includes Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing and Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live. His most recent novel is I Was There the Night He Died. Born and raised in Southwestern Ontario, he lives in Toronto.

Lives of the Poets (with Guitars)

Picking up where Samuel Johnson left off in a book by a similar name written more than two centuries ago, Ray Robertson’s Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) offers up an amplified gathering of thirteen portraits of rock & roll, blues, folk, and alt-country’s most inimitable artists. Some of the musicians covered in the book include The Ramones, Little Richard, Hound Dog Taylor and Canada’s Willie P. Bennett. Irreverent and riotous, Robertson explores the “greater or lesser heat” with which each musician shaped their genre, while offering absorbing insight into their often tumultuous lives.