Dead Dharma: The Grateful Dead and the American Quest for Transcendence

Author/Contributor(s):	Rae, Casey
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Date:	11/05/2026
Binding:	Hardcover
Condition:	NEW

How did the Grateful Dead rise from 1960s San Francisco counterculture to become such unlikely guides for an American spiritual odyssey? Blending cultural history, spiritual sociology, and musicology, Casey Rae connects the band's improvisational ethos to ancient and contemporary Buddhist thought, early and ongoing psychedelic exploration, and the midcentury counterculture along with its commodified reincarnations. From the Beat Generation to today's spiritual supermarket, Dead Dharma shows how the Dead's music and mythos offered many a path of transcendence and ecstatic communion within the endless dance of impermanence.