An enigma, Leonard Norman Cohen was possibly the most improbable bohemian intellectual songwriter/singer in music history. He was certainly the working-class hero, the peoples' poet, the suicidal lamenter of doom and the purveyor of popular songs.

Focusing equally on this popular early albums, his more experimental mid-period and his final, late-career renaissance, this book analyses and interprets every album and every individual song to shed light on the phenomenon of Leonard Cohen.