Peter Guralnick

American music historian, biographer, and critic best known for detailed biographies and histories of American roots music, including acclaimed works on Elvis Presley and Sam Cooke.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. The Colonel And The King

    A sympathetic yet unsparing narrative of Elvis Presley's ascent and the fraught partnership with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, tracing how Parker's cunning promotional instincts, immigrant past, and controlling tactics propelled a provincial singer into global stardom while compromising artistic potential and personal freedom; built on exhaustive research and interviews, it illuminates the mutual dependency, moral ambiguities, legal entanglements, and cultural forces that both made and ultimately complicated one of the 20th century's most iconic entertainment stories.

    The 12993rd Greatest Book of All Time
    Purchase from Bookshop.org