American songwriter, singer, and — per the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" — the first musician ever admitted as a laureate of the literary canon, against considerable resistance from the guardians of the canon he was being admitted to. Born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota, to a Jewish family in the Iron Range, he arrived in Greenwich Village in January 1961 as a nineteen-year-old Woody Guthrie imitator and within four years had rewritten the rules of what a popular song could do and what a performing artist could be.
The first four albums (Bob Dylan, 1962; The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, 1963; The Times They Are a-Changin', 1964; Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964) carried the folk-protest material that made him the voice of the early 1960s movement — "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "The Times They Are a-Changin'," "Only a Pawn in Their Game." He performed at the March on Washington in August 1963, three songs before King's "I Have a Dream." Then, against almost everyone's wishes but his own, he went electric — Bringing It All Back Home (March 1965), Highway 61 Revisited (August 1965), Blonde on Blonde (1966) — and made of the popular song a symbolist, surrealist, visionary instrument that owed as much to Rimbaud and the Beats as to Guthrie. "Like a Rolling Stone," "Desolation Row," "Visions of Johanna," "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands."
The post-motorcycle-crash retreat of 1966 began what is now the longest and strangest body of work in American popular music: the country John Wesley Harding (1967) and Nashville Skyline (1969); the divorce masterwork Blood on the Tracks (1975); the Rolling Thunder Revue; the three gospel records of the born-again years (1979–81); the long middle drift; the late-career revival beginning with Time Out of Mind (1997) and continuing through "Love and Theft" (2001), Modern Times (2006), Tempest (2012), and Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). Chronicles, Volume One (2004) is his austere, mostly truthful memoir. The Never Ending Tour, begun in 1988, is still going.
His standing as a literary figure rests on three claims. The American song tradition — blues, ballad, gospel, country, Tin Pan Alley — is a literary tradition, not merely a commercial one, and Dylan is the writer who made that fact undeniable. The long-form lyric as he reinvented it ("Desolation Row," "Tangled Up in Blue," "Highlands," "Murder Most Foul") can bear the weight of the serious lyric poem. And the figure of the songwriter as Whitmanian American self, continuously remade across sixty years of public performance, is one of the distinctive literary constructions of the American 20th century.