PAUL SIMON - the boy from Queens scored his first hit record in 1957, just months after Elvis Presley. As the songwriting half of Simon & Garfunkel, Simon's work has helped:

define the youth movement of the '60s (“The Sound of Silence,” “Homeward Bound,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water”)
on his own in the '70s, he made radio-dominating hits (“Kodachrome,” “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover,” “Still Crazy After All These Years”)
Simon kicked off the '80s by reuniting with Garfunkel to perform for half a million people in New York’s Central Park
5 years later, his album Graceland sold millions and spurred an international political controversy.
Just this past June, Simon’s latest album, Stranger to Stranger—which includes “Wristband”—debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album charts.

Peter Ames Carlin—bestselling author of the Bruce Springteen biography, Bruce—brings the rather inscrutable Simon vividly to the page in HOMEWARD BOUND: The Life of Paul Simon (Henry Holt and Company). With meticulous detail, he fully reveals one of the most influential popular artists in American history—one whose life and career, in so many ways, exemplify the American experience from 1950 through today. The grandchild of Jewish emigrants from Hungary, Simon has played significant, often controversial, roles in many major cultural and political events of the last sixty year including:



from Tin Pan Alley to Spotify
the civil rights era to the antiapartheid movement
the Monterey Pop Festival to the birth of Saturday Night Live
the explosion of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall
the era-defining soundtrack to The Graduate
the rebirth of the modern Broadway musical
If it happened in pop culture, Simon was there.


Now 75, Simon has sold more than one hundred million records, won 15 Grammy awards, and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. In HOMEWARD BOUND, Carlin gives us Simon as we’ve not seen him: the boy and the man, the artist and the businessman, the friend, husband, partner and adversary. In short, the whole of the man behind his extraordinary music.



About the author: PETER AMES CARLIN is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller, Bruce, the biography of Bruce Springsteen. Carlin has been a senior writer at People, and a television columnist and feature writer at The Oregonian. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and three children.