Greil Marcus (1945-) is an American author, and music journalist.

He has been a rock critic for Rolling Stone and other publications. He is famous (some would say notorious) for his quote concerning Bob Dylan's then-latest album Self Portrait: "What is this shit?"

Fans of his work praise his scholarship and discoveries of cross-currents between music and culture.

Detractors cite his over-the-top prose (Dylan's Blonde on Blonde consists of "instrumentalists and singer all peering into a deeper abyss than anyone had previously imagined existed") and inapt metaphors (Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story gave "room to breathe as the Allies stormed the beach at Normandy").

Bibliography

• Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music, about the beginnings of rock and roll
• Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (editor and contributor)
• Dead Elvis, about the phenomenon of Elvis Presley in the years since his death
• Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, a book on 20th century avant-garde art movements like Dadaism, Lettrist International and Situationist International and their influence on late 20th century counter-cultures
• Invisible Republic (also released as The Old, Weird America: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes), a treatise on America as seen through Dylan's famous Basement Tapes recordings