Bob Dylan

His father's parents got out of Odessa after the pogroms of 1905 and his mother's came from Lithuania in 1902. The family stayed in Duluth until he was six, when his father caught polio and they went back to his mother's hometown of Hibbing, where the Zimmerman brothers sold furniture and appliances. He heard Hank Williams on the Opry and rock and roll coming up from Shreveport and Little Rock. His high school band played Little Richard so loudly the principal cut the microphone. On January 31, 1959, four days before the plane went down in Iowa, he watched Buddy Holly at the Duluth Armory. The yearbook recorded his ambition as joining Little Richard. He lasted about a year at the University of Minnesota.

He reached Greenwich Village early in 1961 and went out to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey to sit with Woody Guthrie, deciding on the spot to become his greatest disciple. A Robert Shelton review in the New York Times that September got him a Columbia contract. He wrote the protest songs, then abandoned them, and on May 17, 1966, at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, a man in the audience shouted "Judas" and Dylan told the band to play it loud. Ten weeks later he wrecked a motorcycle near Woodstock and disappeared. Country records followed, then a Christian conversion and three gospel albums, then 40 years of touring. On October 13, 2016, the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first musician ever to take it.

The great original has always been a great borrower. When Love and Theft came out in 2001, the Wall Street Journal found lines it shared with Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza — Saga had never heard of him and said he was flattered. The Asia Series paintings shown at Gagosian in 2011 turned out to track widely circulated photographs, some of them by Dmitri Kessel and Henri Cartier-Bresson, though Magnum confirmed he had licensed the rights, and painters have worked from photographs since photography existed. In 2017 Andrea Pitzer argued in Slate that his Nobel lecture took some of its Moby-Dick references from SparkNotes. He also married his backing singer Carolyn Dennis on June 4, 1986, five months after their daughter was born, and the marriage stayed secret until a biographer printed it in 2001.

The disposal of the estate has largely happened already, in public, at auction prices. In March 2016 he sold the archive — some 6,000 notebooks, lyric drafts, tapes and letters — to the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa for a reported 15 to 20 million dollars, and the Bob Dylan Center opened there on May 10, 2022. In December 2020 he sold the entire songwriting catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group, copyrights included, at a price the New York Times put north of 300 million dollars. Loose objects go for the same order of money: the Newport Stratocaster fetched 965,000 dollars in 2013 and the handwritten "Like a Rolling Stone" lyrics two million in 2014.

Bob Dylan's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album
  The record that made the protest reputation he then walked away from 1963
• Highway 61 Revisited album 1965
• Blonde on Blonde album
  Cut in Nashville months before the motorcycle crash 1966
• Blood on the Tracks album 1975
• Chronicles: Volume One book
  A memoir that skips most of what readers expected 2004
• Rough and Rowdy Ways album
  Made him the oldest artist with a British number one of new original material 2020

• 1947 aged ~6 The family leaves Duluth for Hibbing after his father contracts polio
• January 31, 1959 aged 17 Watches Buddy Holly play the Duluth Armory Holly died in a plane crash four days later.
• September 1959 aged 18 Enrolls at the University of Minnesota and finds Dinkytown He was gone within about a year.
• 1961 aged ~20 Visits Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital
• May 17, 1966 aged 24 The Judas shout at the Manchester Free Trade Hall He answered that he did not believe the man, called him a liar, and told the band to play it loud.
• July 29, 1966 aged 25 Crashes a Triumph Tiger 100 near Woodstock and vanishes No ambulance was called and he was not hospitalized. The details are still unclear.
• June 4, 1986 aged 45 Secretly marries his backing singer Carolyn Dennis Their daughter had been born on January 31. The marriage stayed private until 2001.
• October 13, 2016 aged 75 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature For creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
• December 2020 aged 79 Sells his entire song catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group The New York Times estimated the price above 300 million dollars.

• Woody Guthrie 1912–1967
  Dust Bowl balladeer whose songs shaped American folk and protest music for later generations. modeled himself on
• Hank Williams 1923–1953
  Country songwriter whose brief career set the template for the genre's later stars. learned the architecture from
• Robert Johnson 1911–1938
  Delta blues guitarist whose small recorded output influenced generations of blues and rock players. shaped by
• Johnny Cash 1932–2003
  Singer-songwriter whose work connected country, gospel, folk, prison reform, and American myth. defended by
• Bruce Springsteen b. 1949
  Songwriter whose music made working-class life, aspiration, and disappointment central themes of American rock. successor
• Jack Kerouac 1922–1969
  Novelist whose spontaneous style and road narratives became defining texts of the Beat Generation. read and borrowed from