New York Times music critic Robert Shelton met Bob Dylan when the young singer first arrived in New York in 1961. His review of the 20-year-old Dylan's appearance at Gerde's Folk City that September launched the career of the man who changed the course of popular music. Shelton became Dylan's friend and champion and, later, his biographer with the release of No Direction Home, hailed as the definitive unauthorized biography of the moody, passionate genius and his world.

Dylan gave Shelton access to his parents, Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, whom no other journalist had ever interviewed in depth; to his brother, David; to childhood friends from Hibbing, Minn.; to fellow students and friends from Minneapolis; and to Suze Rotolo, the muse immortalized on the cover of Dylan's 1963 album Freewheelin'; among others. No Direction Home took 20 years to complete and was acclaimed as "thoughtful and compassionate" by Time and "vastly comprehensive and rather magnificent" by Washington Post Book World. It was also heavily edited prior to publication.

Out of print for more than 10 years, the new edition of No Direction Home, edited by Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries and to be published in May by Backbeat Books to coincide with Dylan's 70th birthday, will restore some 20,000 words of Shelton's original manuscript and will bring readers closer than ever to Dylan, his manager Albert Grossman, and his remarkable circle of friends, including Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Yarrow. This edition also will include key images of Dylan from throughout his enduring career, along with updated footnotes and bibliography to bring Dylan's story up to date.

Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times called the original No Direction Home "the finest of the many [Dylan] biographies." In May, that seminal biography will be that much improved.

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