The Beatles: Literary Anthology recounts the group's mercurial rise from the British Merseybeat scene; the "British invasion" that made them iconic figures in the USA; the experimentation with song structure and sound-recording technique that re-defined pop music forever; their embracing of psychedelic drugs, hippie utopianism and pacifism, amidst the social changes of the mid-to-late 1960s; the band's acrimonious split, and the disparate, sometimes tragic post-Beatles paths followed byJohn Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. The strange extremes of a career virtually unparalled in terms of mass-media fame are also examined in thought-provoking articles: the American Far Right's conspiracy theory that marked the Beatles as agents of Communism; the "Paul is Dead" myth, and the cryptographic reading of Beatles trivia that inspired it; the attempts of Lennon, with all his human failings, to live with his absurdly messianic status; the insane "messages" thattheManson Family girls deciphered from the lyrics of The White Album; the obsessions of disturbed Beatles fan Mark Chapman, and his tragic attempt to steal a little of Lennon's celebrity.