Lipstick Traces

A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Greil Marcus

    A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out.
       --Terry Eagleton, New York Times Book Review

    That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols—and make it all cohere—is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter.
       --Katherine Dieckmann, Voice Literary Supplement

    Lipstick Traces has the energy of its obsessions, and it snares you in the manner of those intense, questing and often stoned sessions of intellectual debate you may have experienced in your college years. It was destined, in other words, to achieve cult status.
       --Ben Brantley, New York Times

    In 1989, Harvard University Press published Lipstick Traces, the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold "secret history" which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian événements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies...It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them...[Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page...My 20-year-old copy of Lipstick Traces is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house.
       --John Harris, The Guardian

  • Cover: Lipstick Traces
  • A photo of the author

Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces, The Dustbin of History (both from Harvard), and The Shape of Things to Come, The Old, Weird America, Mystery Train, and other books.