To have been alive during the last sixty years is to have lived with the music of Paul Simon. The boy from Queens scored his first hit record in 1957, just months after Elvis Presley ignited the rock era. As the songwriting half of Simon & Garfunkel, his work helped define the youth movement of the sixties. On his own in the seventies, Simon made radio-dominating hits. He kicked off the eighties by reuniting with Garfunkel to perform for half a million New Yorkers in Central Park. Five years later, Simon's album Graceland sold millions and spurred an international political controversy. And he's not finished: Simon's latest album, Stranger to Stranger, debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album charts when it was released in June 2016. The grandchild of Jewish emigrants from Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire, the 75-year-old singer-songwriter has sold more than one hundred million records, won fifteen Grammy awards, and been installed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. Simon has also played significant, often controversial, roles in many major events of the last sixty years: from Tin Pan Alley to Spotify; from the civil rights era to the antiapartheid movement; from the Monterey Pop Festival to Saturday Night Live, Woody Allen's Annie Hall, the rebirth of the modern Broadway musical, and beyond. A life story with the scope and power of an epic novel, Peter Ames Carlin's Homeward Bound reveals one of the most influential popular artists in American history as he has never been seen before: as a boy and a man, an artist and a businessman, a lover and husband, and the living animation of America's ever-changing definitions of personal and cultural identity.--From dust jacket.