Dennis McNally received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1977 for a biography of Jack Kerouac, which was then published by Random House in 1979 under the title Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America. Having been selected as The Grateful Dead's authorized biographer in 1980, he became the band's publicist in 1984. In 2002 he published A Long Strange Trip; The Inside History of the Grateful Dead with Broadway Books, which achieved the New York Times Best Seller list. Dennis is working on a book about the American bohemian tradition from Thoreau through Mark Twain and thence to Bob Dylan.