Bob Dylan (b. 1941)

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and named himself after Dylan Thomas. He wrote his first great songs at twenty. He has not stopped writing since.

His Nobel Prize in 2016 divided opinion sharply, which was appropriate: his work has divided opinion since 1965, when he plugged in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival and half the audience booed. The question his prize raises — is a song literature? — does not have a clean answer, and that is part of why it is worth asking.

What is not in question is his command of the rhetorical traditions he drew on: the protest ballad, the biblical cadence, the vernacular American lyric, the oblique statement that means something entirely different from what it says. Blowin' in the Wind is a series of rhetorical questions that refuse to be answered. That refusal is the argument.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. He did not attend the ceremony.

His Nobel Lecture is a recording he made in 2017, six months after the ceremony. In it he talks about three books he read at school: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey. Listen to it, or read it, at NobelPrize.org.