Peter Guralnick's books on American vernacular music have received universal acclaim since the original publication of Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock 'n' Roll in 1971. Hailed by critic Nat Hentoff as "a national resource," Guralnick has published five prizewinning works of nonfiction, including Lost Highway in 1979, Searching for Robert Johnson, and Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. About the last, critic Jim Miller wrote in Newsweek: "This is a stunning chronicle. . . . What Guralnick has written is cultural history - a panoramic survey of a lost world [and] one of the best books ever written on American popular music."

Guralnick's 1994 Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley was hailed in a front-page review by the New York Times Book Review as "a masterpiece of biographical art." Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, the concluding volume of Guralnick's two-volume biography, tells the full, true, and mesmerizing story of Elvis Presley's last two decades in rich detail. The New York Times Book Review hailed it as "among the most ambitious and crucial undertakings yet devoted to a major American figure of the second half of the twentieth century." It was honored as a best book of the year by multiple publications and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke further extends the sweep of Guralnick's work. It is a quintessential American story, encompassing elements of race, class, wealth, sex, music, religion, and personal transformation, "a great story," as NAACP Chairman Julian Bond writes, "of a complex man who was more than his adoring public ever dreamed." It is also the story of a turbulent and hopeful age, re-creating vividly the astonishing richness of the African American world from which Sam Cooke emerged and the combination of wit, style, and resiliency that was necessary to survive and overcome the pervasive prejudice of the day.

Kit Rachlis
Editor-in Chief, Los Angeles magazine

Born in Paris, France, raised in New York City, Kit Rachlis has served as Arts Editor of the Boston Phoenix, Executive Editor of The Village Voice, Editor-in-chief of the L.A. Weekly and Senior Projects Editor at the Los Angeles Times. In June 2000, he became Editor-in-chief of Los Angeles magazine. In the last four years, Los Angeles magazine has been nominated for four National Magazine Awards and won more City and Regional Magazine awards than any other magazine.