Seven Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

George Carlin's comic material represents the most enduring legacy of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. If acid rock, Victorian clothing, Aquarian spirituality, and radical pranksterism have all fallen by the wayside as musty reminders of the hippie heyday, Carlin came to embody the indefatigable questioning of authority that was the true legacy of the 1960s.

In Seven Dirty Words, journalist and cultural critic James Sullivan tells the story of an alternative America from the 1950s to the present from the singular vantage point of George Carlin, the Catholic boy for whom nothing was sacred. A critical biography, Seven Dirty Words is an insightful (and, of course, hilarious) examination of Carlin's body of work as it pertained to its cultural times and the man who created it, from his early days as a more-or-less conventional comedian to his stunning transformation into the subversive comedic voice of the emerging counterculture. Sullivan also chronicles Carlin's struggles with censorship and drugs, as well as the full-blown renaissance he experienced in the 1990s, both personally and professionally, when he became an elder statesman to a younger generation of comics who revered him. Seven Dirty Words is the definitive biography of an American master who changed the world, and also a work of cultural commentary that frames George Carlin's extraordinary legacy.

James Sullivan is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and author of books on James Brown (The Hardest Working Man) and consumer culture (Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon). He previously served as pop music and culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and has written for Rolling Stone and many other publications.