The story of the Beatles begins not with the rock-'n’-roll revolution of the 1950s, but in the Romantic revolution of the 1790s, when age-old notions about literature, politics, education, and social relations changed forever. Tracing the Beatles to their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poetic, musical, and philosophic roots, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles weaves literary criticism and cultural analysis together to how the Fab Four—in their songs, personalities, and relations with each other—mirror the themes and history of Anglo-American Romanticism.