Why Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature

You don’t hear people making predictions about who’s going to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

There’s no announced list of nominees to choose from, and the winners are almost always writers whose works appeal to intellectuals, seldom to the masses. Even if you diligently keep abreast of recent, highly regarded English-language literature, you may never have heard of the Polish or Egyptian or Chinese writer who won the prize.

So there are seldom any “favorites,” and therefore never any real surprises when the winner is announced.

This year there was. Bob Dylan, an immensely popular American singer-songwriter who, at least for a couple of decades, could legitimately have been described as a “rock star,” won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It surprised everybody, even though nobody had expectations. “Holy mother of God. Dylan wins the Nobel Prize,” Rosanne Cash tweeted.

There’s been a little grumbling about the pick. He’s the first musician to ever win the award. His songs were played in coffee houses, on top-40 radio and in arenas, not in theaters and opera houses. It’s popular music, some people are saying, and therefore it’s not literature. And, despite some truly great albums in recent years, Dylan’s best work and his era of profound influence are far in the past.

Even most of us who cheer his Nobel win would agree with that.

I think you had to be there, in the early ’60s, to really appreciate what Dylan did.

I was 10 when his first album came out, and 11 when “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” kind of his breakout album, made its way into my home via my older sister. I would rush home from school to listen to “Freewheelin’ ” before she got home. She probably would have given me permission to play it had I asked, but I didn’t want to risk a “no.”

He was still recording some folk covers at that point, but they didn’t grab me.

It was Dylan’s original songs — “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” that shook me in a way nothing else ever had. I didn’t truly understand what happened in the relationship described in “Don’t Think Twice,” and I certainly had no idea what “Hard Rain” was supposed to be saying, but the images in those songs ignited something in me. If nothing else, they definitely sparked my love of music, books and poetry. I know they did that for a lot of my friends as well.

I think it’s safe to say that the social and cultural revolutions of the ’60s would not have happened as forcefully without Dylan’s words and music inhabiting the souls of so many privileged white kids of the era. Only a few of his songs, and only those in the very early years, were actually “protest” songs. What moved a generation were those impressionistic, surrealistic songs that led us to wonder, think and read.

When Dylan referenced Rimbaud and Ezra Pound in his songs, we went to libraries and bookstores to learn more about those people. When he sang about Emmitt Till, we investigated the depth of racism in America.

When I got to college, I had some English professors — old guys, probably in their 30s — who called Dylan the greatest American poet. It seemed like an odd thing to say, but even now I can’t come up with a solid argument to the contrary.

Can popular music, even Dylan’s popular music, be considered “literature?” Should a rock star win the Nobel? That’s arguable either way.

But Dylan’s best work inspired a passion for words, a love of sophisticated thought and a commitment to social justice in huge numbers of people. It may be hard to see it in hindsight, but the songs Dylan wrote changed the world.

That’s precisely what the very greatest literature is supposed to do. Dylan’s songs probably did so more profoundly than the works of almost any of the hundred or so winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This story was originally published October 14, 2016 at 3:03 PM with the headline "Why Bob Dylan deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature."