John Lennon is one of the most well known founders of rock 'n' roll. Geoffrey Giuliano looks at the man who was perpetually at odds with himself and unravels the mystery of Lennon's private life through interviews with family members and friends, letters, and never before published diaries and tapes from Lennon himself. What the book reveals in chapter after chapter, is a man desperate for help but surrounded by people Lennon perceived to be bent on his continued fall into depression, bulimia, and cultism. The reader finds that Lennon is full of contradictions--devoted husband and adulterer; he is portrayed as a doting dad, but was an absentee father; a macrobiotic health enthusiast who wrestled with alcoholism, heroin addiction, and bulimia; he was a spokesman for world peace, but was unable to control his volcanic temper; a vocal feminist and recalcitrant chauvinist; an innovative and influential rock 'n' roller who renounced music for years. As this book makes abundantly clear, Lennon himself was painfully conscious of his weaknesses, excesses, and failings, of the disparity between the public image and his everyday person. He spent a lifetime struggling to understand himself and to reconcile the conflicts within him, a struggle that ended in New York in 1980 when he was assassinated. Lennon in America offers a revolutionary and all-too-human view of the twentieth century's most legendary rock 'n' roller by the writer most qualified to tell the tale.