Bob Dylan

Origins and early life

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, on 24 May 1941 — his Hebrew name is Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham — into a small and close-knit Jewish community; his paternal grandparents had left Odessa after the pogroms of 1905, his maternal grandparents were Lithuanian Jews who reached America in 1902, and he had his bar mitzvah in May 1954.

Work and career

When he was six his father contracted polio and the family went back to his mother's home town of Hibbing, an iron-range town where his father and uncles kept a furniture and appliance store. He heard rock and roll on stations broadcasting up from Shreveport and Little Rock, formed bands at Hibbing High School loud enough for the principal to cut the microphone, and on 31 January 1959 saw Buddy Holly play at the Duluth Armory, four days before the crash — a night he was still describing in his Nobel lecture.

He enrolled at the University of Minnesota that autumn, turned from rock to folk in the coffee houses of Dinkytown, and went to New York in 1961. What he did there had not been done: he took the plain forms of the folk and blues tradition and put inside them a literary intelligence they had never carried, so that a song could hold argument, image and irony at once. Blowin' in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin' became the anthems of the civil rights and antiwar movements; the electric records of 1965 and 1966 and the six minutes of Like a Rolling Stone broke what a single was allowed to be.

Recognition

He received a Pulitzer citation in 2008, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.