Beatles Are Here!

“This compulsively readable personal history . . . gathers the recollections of fans, writers, musicians, and artists” about the enduring impact of The Beatles (Publishers Weekly).

The arrival of the Beatles in America was an unforgettable cultural touchstone. Through the voices of those who witnessed it or were swept up in it indirectly, The Beatles Are Here! explores the emotional impact—some might call it hysteria—of the Fab Four’s February 1964 dramatic landing on our shores. Contributors, including Lisa See, Gay Talese, Renée Fleming, Roy Blount, Jr., Greil Marcus, and many others, describe in essays and interviews how they were inspired by the Beatles.

This intimate and entertaining collection arose from writer Penelope Rowlands’s own Beatlemaniac phase: she was one of the screaming girls captured in an iconic photograph that has since been published around the world—and is displayed on the cover of this book. The stories of these girls, who found each other again almost fifty years later, are part of this volume as well. The Beatles Are Here! gets to the heart of why, half a century later, the Beatles still matter to us so deeply.