“Who Is That Man?: Identities, Space, and the Dylan Legacy”

By Andrew Fehribach, Radboud University

 

Introduction

Bob Dylan’s legacy never seems to close. With every shift in genre or glanced over album by more casual listeners, Dylan manages to surprise the world with what he offers to his audience. His lasting appearance in cultural consciousness encourages people to determine what he represents to each generation that discovers him. The foundations of his celebrity identity continue to be the topic of study and intrigue, as most recently seen with the December 2024 release of the film in the United States covering Dylan’s rise to stardom in the 1960s called A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet. Following this long held celebrity identity, his legacy more recently expanded into the age of Dylan as laureate. Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Dylan’s identity as a celebrity singer-songwriter intersects with this new identity. Reconciling the relationship of these two identities furthers the process of establishing Dylan’s legacy for future fans and critics.

Contemporary interpretations of Dylan’s legacy post-2016 include the 2022 public opening of the Bob Dylan Center museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; the 2021 publication of the essay collection The World of Bob Dylan; and the 2023 publication of initial research into the archives with Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine. Each of these interpretations aim to promote and shape a particular narrative for Dylan’s legacy, showing a vibrant discourse looking back at Dylan and his significance moving forward. Including the laureate identity in the Dylan legacy involves reflecting on the celebrity identity because of the importance of the 1960s on both his writing and his renown in popular culture.

In the case of this essay, I am interested in connecting these identities to the spaces that Dylan occupied during this time period and interpreting the impact of masculinity to the formation of the laureate and celebrity identities. To make this connection, I examine the gender dynamics of two influential spaces on Dylan’s identities in the 1960s: the Beat Generation and the New York City folk scene. The spaces Dylan occupied between roughly 1962-1966 are particularly important to examine. Not only are these the years that Dylan achieved stardom, but this is also the time period that Nobel Prize committee cited by referencing his 1966 album, Blonde on Blonde, as a significant reason for him receiving the prize: “[Blonde on Blonde is] an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and putting together refrains and his pictorial thinking.”[1] Studying these spaces as masculine explores how Dylan’s own masculinity relates to the connection of the celebrity and laureate identities that his legacy simultaneously occupies. This in turn begins to interpret the direction the Dylan legacy could go as these two identities coexist while interpreting the consequences of historic masculine space on contemporary literature. For this essay, I use “celebrity” to signify Dylan’s rise to popular cultural prominence and “laureate” to signify the eventual validation of his work at this time as literature by the Nobel Prize committee.

The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation praised the art of performance: fleeting moments of experience that romantically capture revelations for those on stage and in the audience. The opening lines of “Mr. Tambourine Man” recognize the intoxication and unsustainability of these occasions: “I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand / Vanished from my hand.”[2] People recall and retell of the “empire” that Dylan references in their own lives, creating the foundations for a literary movement that aggrandizes adrenaline as the muse. The Beat Generation weaves such momentous performances into their history. Studying gender in relation to those who performed and the impact of those performances on recollections of the Beat Generation shows how people reify these spaces in their retellings, which maintains not only the literary tradition, but also the masculine space. This process of reification then perpetuates to this masculine space that Dylan developed artistically from, tying masculinity to both of his identities.

Allen Ginsberg performing “Howl” at the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco became one of these storied performances. Six poets performed that night: Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and the master of ceremonies Kenneth Rexroth.[3] The website for the Beat Museum in San Francisco cites McClure as remembering that “when Allen read ‘Howl,’ we all knew a line had been crossed.” Their website continues, “the impact of that first reading was so momentous that a re-creation of the event was organized in March of the following year.”[4] In his 1958 semi-autobiographical novel, The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac recalls the conversations that night as relating “anarchistic ideas about how Americans don’t know how to live.”[5] To honor the famous event, a plaque sits outside the former venue, placed there in 2005. It states: “Presented to San Francisco on the 50th Anniversary of the first full-length public reading of HOWL at Six Gallery.”[6] The recreation of the reading, Kerouac’s account of the original reading, and the commemorative plaque of the event show that this event quickly and lastingly became a part of the history of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg himself unabashedly hyperbolizes and dramatizes the 1955 event in an essay from 1957, showing how its significance evidently grew with nostalgia and pride:

 

A group of six unknown poets in San Francisco, in a moment of drunken enthusiasm, decided to defy the system of academic poetry, official reviews, New York publishing machinery, national sobriety and generally accepted standards to good taste, by giving a free reading of their poetry in a run down second rate experimental art gallery… The audience, expecting some Bohemian stupidity, was left stunned, and the poets were left with the realization that they were fated to make a permanent change in the literary firmament of the States.[7]

 

This quote signifies that moments like these are revelatory and lasting. People regenerate this space by telling these stories of profundity and triumph, which reinforces the conventions of the space from that time. This is not to suggest that the creation and perpetuation of masculine space was entirely exclusionary (more on that regarding Diane di Prima shortly), rather that this socialization indicates how space encouraged men disproportionately to women when cementing themselves in the literary traditions of the Beat Generation.

To better understand the role of masculine space in the Beat Generation, especially in the context of this event, On The Road by Jack Kerouac from 1957 details how gender factored into this community of writers. Considering this book is important when interpreting the Beat Generation because Kerouac earned an idolized reputation in the community for this novel, with Ginsberg even projecting the Walt Whitman poem called “Poets To Come” onto Kerouac, describing him as the “orator” that the poem predicts.[8] But Kerouac’s representation of women in On The Road considers them as secondary in the masculine space that the novel exhibits, signified by the relationship he presents between the characters Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s persona), and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady). This masculine space is evident in such instances as an arrangement made by Sal and Dean to have Dean’s partner, Marylou, “switch to [Sal] in Frisco.” Sal understood that “Dean would go back to Camille [Dean’s wife] in Frisco” and that would allow Sal to “have an affair with Marylou.” Kerouac even acknowledges that he did not really know how Marylou felt about all of this: “What was on Marylou’s mind I don’t know.”[9]

Beat writer Diane di Prima likewise recalls this type of masculine space in her 1969 book Memoirs of a Beatnik. Brenda Knight in her 1996 book Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution notes that di Prima’s book is a work of erotica that interested a major publishing house before her poetry did, further signifying the positionality of women in the Beat Generation as signifying sexuality more than poetic seriousness at this time.[10] Speaking from her own perspective of being a woman among the Beat Generation with multiple sexual partners, di Prima reflects positively on “being a chick to three men,” stating that she “found it is usually a good thing to be the woman of many men at once.”[11] Reflecting on the potential of this space, she considers a culture with a “social structure” of free and self-sufficient women and that this freedom alongside men signifies “one of the wildest magics this planet has ever witnessed.”[12] This shows that while the masculine space for Kerouac focuses on how men use women, di Prima is an example of a woman using the space for her own agency: “Live with one man, and you begin to have a claim on him. Live with five, and have the same claim, but it is spread out, ambiguous, undefined.”[13] Di Prima suggests here that masculine space is not indicative of complete containment for women, rather that the space can be wielded for one’s own benefits within that dominant space to communal and even literary success. This affirms the space as masculine without negating the agency that women managed to exercise within it. Such representations of this masculine space indicates the type of environment that Ginsberg performed “Howl” in for the Six Gallery reading.

In Women of the Beat Generation, Knight confirms this agency within masculine space as it pertains to Beat literature: “The women of the Beat Generation, with rare exception, escaped the eye of the camera; they stayed underground, writing. They were instrumental in the literary legacy of the Beat Generation, however.”[14] As with di Prima, Knight acknowledges that women engaged the space despite the lesser coverage of their work: “In many ways, women of the Beat were cut from the same cloth as the men: fearless, angry, high risk, too smart, restless, highly irregular. They took chances, made mistakes, made poetry, made love, made history. Women of the Beat weren’t afraid to get dirty.”[15] It is the stifled presence of women as literary figures in this community as a result of masculine space, however, that relates to the importance of this masculine space to Dylan’s identities when interpreting his masculinity. Despite establishing a masculinity of challenging and reshaping conventions, so the story goes, the performers of Six Gallery and the Beat Generation community more broadly were less groundbreaking regarding gender roles in their spaces. No women performed at Six Gallery. Although Dylan was not involved in this particular performance, he certainly engaged with these traditions in his own time.

Steven Belletto remarks in his essay for The World of Bob Dylan called “The Beats” that “Dylan adapted the older writers’ social postures and attitudes toward literary tradition to help him forge his own idiosyncratic vision.”[16] Belletto continues, citing Sean Wilentz’s 2010 book, Dylan in America, as saying that “Dylan’s involvement with the writings of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beat Generation is nearly as essential to Dylan’s biography as his immersion in rock and roll, rhythm and blues, and then Woody Guthrie.”[17] The 2019 documentary film directed by Martin Scorsese, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, shows footage of Dylan and Ginsberg visiting Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts. They read lines from Kerouac’s book Mexico City Blues with Dylan mentioning that he first received the book in 1959 and that “it just blew a hole in [his] mind.”[18] “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” tie in heavily with the respective Ginsberg poems “Howl” and “America,” further indicating the influence of the Beat Generation on Dylan’s writing in the 1960s. Belletto observes the stream of questions that “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “America” share and also the phrase “I saw” appearing in “Howl” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”[19] In the 2005 documentary also directed by Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Ginsberg commented that “Hard Rain” signifies “that the torch has been passed to another generation.”[20]

There are several other examples in Dylan’s recordings to showcase what he adapted from his time with the Beat Generation. For instance, Raymond Foye in his essay for Mixing Up the Medicine called “Reflections on ‘Dirge’” states: “Although the album title Planet Waves has always been considered an allusion to Ginsberg’s 1968 City Lights book Planet News, I couldn’t help but think what was really on Dylan’s mind was Ginsberg’s next book, The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971.”[21] Another instance of Dylan drawing from the Beat Generation for his albums is his decision to keep the opening sounds of laughter on the studio recording for “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” playing into the focus on performance that the Beat Generation admired.[22] In the context of Dylan growing as a lyricist, Belletto observes and Ginsberg confirms that Dylan earned recognition for his work alongside the Beat Generation. This community significantly shaped who he was as a lyricist, with Dylan even referencing them in his first post-Nobel Prize album of original material, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on the song “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”: “I was born on the wrong side of the railroad tracks / Like Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac.”[23] With such influence on Dylan’s identities, interpreting representations of the masculine space of the Beat Generation explores the effects of such a space on its inhabitants.

An interpretation of the effects of the Beat Generation environment shows up in the 2007 movie I’m Not There. The character of Robbie (this version of Dylan is played by Heath Ledger) represents a family version of Dylan who is married and has children. Claire, representing Dylan’s wife at the time, argues with Robbie about a remark he made to one of their friends about believing in the possibility of real social change being connected to femininity. He continues by saying that women “can never be poets” and lists off “Whitman, Rimbaud, [and] Shakespeare” as examples to dismiss Emily Dickinson.[24] Although likely hyperbolized for effect and not necessarily representing a genuine belief that Dylan held, this scene is an effective reminder of a version of Dylan’s legacy in the masculine spaces that the Beat Generation helped cultivate as seen in part through the Six Gallery reading and in On The Road.

Dylan’s lyrics during his time in the 1960s come at least in part from the world of the Beat Generation. As the celebrity identity developed in this space, so too did an eventual laureate identity develop. Another masculine space where such development occurred around this time for Dylan was the New York City folk scene.

 

The New York City Folk Scene

The New York City folk scene of the 1960s similarly represents a masculine space that Dylan developed his laureate and celebrity identities in. Like the Beat Generation’s literary community, the folk scene had gendered spaces that situated women differently from men. Even Joan Baez, who represents an acclaimed woman in this space, became a supporting character in the Dylan chronology once his celebrity reached new heights throughout the 1960s. As with the Beat Generation, examining this masculine space and the relationship Dylan himself had with it reveals how masculinity influenced his artistic development, which eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature. Also similar to the Beat Generation, the folk scene shows women with agency in masculine spaces. Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, and the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis each convey representations of this masculine space. Other sources then confirm these representations.

Chronicles, published in 2004, gives us an account directly from Dylan of his perspective on his time in the New York City folk scene forty years later. It’s a collection of names and faces that present new ways of living and thinking to Dylan during this time, introduced to him by Suze Rotolo. “New York City,” Dylan writes, “the city that would come to shape my destiny.”[25] He describes the iconic venue called the Gaslight as “a closed drawn circle that an unknown couldn’t break into. There weren’t any auditions. It was a club I wanted to play, needed to.” He continues: “I kept my sights on the Gaslight. How could I not? Compared to it, the rest of the places on the street were nameless and miserable, low-level basket houses or small coffeehouses where the performer passed the hat. But I began to play as many as I could. I had no choice.”[26] The environment drew Dylan in and its acceptance of him provided him ample space to develop his craft. Looking back, Dylan still understands the people and music that made up that time in his life as irrevocably a part of his career.

The perspectives men had of women relate to Dylan with his reflection in Chronicles that having a woman on stage was a “trick” to bring in more money. In describing a waitress “who was good to the eye” that he’d have “take up collection,” Dylan writes that she would “wear a funny little bonnet, heavy black mascara, low laced blouse – looked almost naked from the waist up under a capelike coat. I’d split the money with her later, but it was too much of a hassle to do it all the time. I still made more when she was with me than when I was working on my own.”[27] Chronicles, while not being a reliable source of strict facts, does serve as an effective glimpse into Dylan’s relationship with this space. The significance of this space to Dylan’s identities then explains how masculinity relates to his legacy.

Corroborating Dylan’s account is My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me by Terri Thal from 2023, a memoir that explores the New York City folk scene at this time with firsthand accounts. Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez wrote a review of this book for the Dylan Review where he cites Thal as representing that “she was not an ‘object’ as so many women were… her story, which culminates with her arrival on the folk scene, is also a testament to the ways the strictures of patriarchy mitigate or partly subvert agency.” Dominguez continues, noting that Thal insists that the folk scene was not infected with the grossest forms of misogyny – she says it was not a ‘sexist scene.’” Despite indicating that the scene was not sexist, Thal does recognize that it was a masculine space. Dominguez cites another line from the book: “‘there was sort of an assumption that there were factors distinguishing the female folk singers from one another in ways that were never considered for the men.’” He then adds: “Unlike male performers, women (Carolyn Hester, Judy Collins, Joan Baez) had to be pitted against each other.” Thal also recounts a “personal experience about an encounter with Clarence Hood – a manager of The Gaslight – who had asked her ‘to have a sexual interlude.’”[28] Such a masculine space of men sexualizing Thal is further written about by Suze Rotolo in her own memoir from 2008 called A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. “There were not many females hanging out at their [Dave Van Ronk and Thal] flat,” Rotolo writes, “it was mainly guys… who came and went, casually taking in Terri in her white underwear as she offered them things to eat or drink, and then sat down on the couch to join the conversation.”[29] This review of Thal’s book as a memoir of the folk scene that Dylan learned from and Rotolo’s own account of spending time with Thal supports Dylan’s account in Chronicles of this masculine space.

The influence of this space on Dylan during his rise situates its importance when interpreting the relationship of his two identities with each other. In No Direction Home, Dylan says he identified with the Woody Guthrie book, Bound For Glory, “more than [he] even did with On The Road.” When speaking on folk music records, especially those recorded by Guthrie, Dylan describes himself as a “musical expeditionary” who would “just would have to immerse [himself] in them.”[30] Even post-1960s tracks such as “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” (1997) and “Brownsville Girl” (1986) (previously titled “New Danville Girl” as labeled on the 2021 Springtime in New York bootleg series album) feature references to songs by Guthrie, showing the direct and lasting lyrical influence Guthrie had on Dylan: “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” (a lifted line for Dylan’s song) and “Danville Girl” respectively.

Taking in the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s, Dylan says in No Direction Home that “there was something in their eyes that would say ‘I know something you don’t know’ and I wanted to be that kind of performer.”[31] This sentiment is evident with his development as a songwriter by him using melodies and lyrics he learned at this time, which became a staple of his referential writing style. “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and “Chimes Of Freedom” to name a few songs that came from folk songs he likely heard and performed in connection to the New York City clubs: “No More Auction Block,” “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons,” and “Chimes Of Trinity” respectively. Suze Roloto also writes in A Freewheelin’ Time about how Dave Van Ronk was “well known and well respected in the downtown music scene” and that those years were

 

formative … and Dave did a lot of the forming and teaching. It was amazing how much that man knew … The Van Ronk apartment at 190 Waverly quickly became the living room of the new generation of bohemians … [Dylan] was intent on having me get to know the people he had become close to since coming to the city that winter, telling me how great they were and how much he wanted me to meet them.[32]

 

Dylan’s association with the folk scene developed him artistically similar to his development from his ties with the Beat Generation.

With the impact on Dylan as an eventual laureate clear, the added dynamics of masculinity in this space becomes relevant. The 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis, the screenplay of which comes from Dave Van Ronk’s 2005 memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, follows the titular character Llewyn Davis through the New York City folk scene of the early 1960s. The film presents this scene as the environment that built the image of Dylan as an intellectual while maintaining shallow impressions on women. These representations reflect well the type of space that Dylan described in Chronicles.

In the film, Davis performs countless times in the Gaslight, meets Albert Grossman, but never finds his way as a folk singer. The end of the film features an actor portraying Bob Dylan from the early 1960s performing on the same stage. Men treat the women who appear on the stage in the movie with similar unserious indifference as the men in Kerouac’s books treat women. One example of this is how men in the film discuss the character Jean Berkey, who is a woman featured performing during the movie. The club owner talks to Davis about the struggles of the folk music scene and that the biggest crowds they draw for performances are from men sexualizing Jean.[33] This film portrays gender on stage in this space as sexualizing and demeaning towards women and a type of misunderstood intellectualism among men.

The characters Jim Berkey and Al Cody prepare to perform a song with Davis called “Please Mr. Kennedy” that he does not respect, refusing royalties in favor of a $200 session fee in part out of desperation for money. Even the man who appears to be the producer said that the song was “not the most serious music we’ve recorded at this studio.”[34] Later in the film, characters representing wealth and a higher social class mention hearing the song, calling it “hysterical” and that it would be “a hit.” They continue by saying “I wish I was in your business. I mean, one hit could fix you up.”[35]

By concluding the film with Dylan performing as part of the folk scene, and with the film’s viewers knowing Dylan’s eventual career, it suggests that it was Dylan who changed the perception of folk music and who began to bring in crowds from his talent and intellect. The Coen Brothers’ depiction of this cultural shift effectively explores how gender related to this shift by presenting Dylan as simply another performer in contrast to the women and men before him. This representation matches the accounts of gender dynamics that Dylan provides in Chronicles. Masculinity within the film is about artistic integrity and assuming a Dean Moriarty-esque image of drifting around and traveling West, as invoked through the character Johnny Five, who Davis drives with to Chicago, as is the opening destination of Sal in On The Road.[36] Bob Dylan represents that folk singer ideal fulfilled, something that the film recognizes as occurring in a masculine space.

As with the Beat Generation, the New York City folk scene connects to Dylan’s identities as both a celebrity and a laureate. This connection then provides insight into how masculinity relates to these identities. The significance of this past masculine space on the contemporary laureate identity emerges with the reification of this space in the act of writing literature.

 

Conclusion 

Masculine spaces such as those cultivated by the Beat Generation and by the New York City folk scene are important to understand in order to better contextualize Dylan’s Nobel Prize win alongside his masculinity and his legacy. This is because neglecting to consider such influences produces uncritical narratives that maintain the authority of the male dominance of these spaces over time. One such narrative appears in the 2023 book by Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, called The Masters: Conversations with Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend. Wenner’s book is a compilation of interviews that he previously conducted with each of these musicians at different points in their respective careers. It is the title, the introduction, and the all-male selection of artists in particular that suggest the continuation of masculine spaces infiltrating contemporary discourse. In the introduction for the book, Wenner writes: “To us, the artists were the moral compass of society, the gatekeepers of truth … I quoted the Lovin’ Spoonful, saying that the magazine was for anyone who believed that rock and roll was ‘the magic that can set you free.’”[37]

This act of honoring individuals by definitively ranking them recalls an idea that Virginia Woolf mentions in A Room of One’s Own published in 1929: “That deep-seated desire,” Woolf writes, “not so much that SHE shall be inferior as that HE shall be superior.”[38] The Masters exhibiting this need to be superior through the term “masters” then advertises the Dylan legacy in terms of his artistic mastery and cultural influence. This framing of Dylan alongside the other men in the title indicates that the masculine spaces in the past reverberate into the representations of legacy in the future. Such a reinforcement of masculine space is evidence of the lasting effects of this space on artistic expression. Woolf explores this temporality pertaining to space and its significance further in her essay collection.

 I reference Woolf in relation to The Masters because she writes in A Room of One’s Own how the reverberations of spaces in the past affect the establishment of legacy in literature. This then, she argues, impacts who is likely to create literature in the future. For instance, Woolf references the end of the 18^th century as a time when women began writing more, which enabled future writers to produce masterpieces of literature:

 

Without those forerunners,” Woolf contends, “Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind in a single voice.[39]

 

Jessica Gildersleeve, who wrote the introduction to the 2021 edition of A Room of One’s Own, argues that having a room of one’s own “signifies the feminist reimagination of the domestic space” because “men occupied the public sphere while women were confined to the private. They were expected to serve the interests of their home and family rather than their individual needs or desires.”[40] This spatial reimagination that Gildersleeve interprets from Woolf regarding domestic space also applies when retrospectively considering masculine spaces. The reimagination of past masculine spaces is possible because, as seen through accounts including di Prima, Thal, and Dylan himself, women occupied these spaces. Wenner’s use of the term “masters” and his assertion that these musicians were “the moral compass of society” ranks and divides artists without this reimagination of the spaces and contexts that influenced their work. As Woolf indicates, this creates a tradition that encourages certain groups to continue “thinking in common” while limiting other groups to produce work as “solitary births.” After explaining in an interview why he didn’t include artists such as Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder in his book, Wenner says that they didn’t meet “that same historic standard.”[41] Wenner later apologized “wholeheartedly” for these remarks.[42] Nevertheless, the sentiment from his original statement of needing to meet a “historic standard” further reinforces Woolf’s notion of “solitary births” when interpreting the structure of his book. Reading The Masters through A Room of One’s Own problematizes how Wenner develops a legacy for Dylan because Woolf shows that Wenner’s book perpetuates the masculine space of the Beat Generation and the New York City folk scene. The celebrity identity in these spaces that greatly influenced Dylan’s 1960s catalogue then significantly relates to how his masculinity connects to him as a laureate.

Examining the gendered relationships in these spaces recognizes the celebrity identity as being intertwined with the laureate identity. In relation to Dylan’s masculinity, the connection between these identities signifies how the effects of space resonate through time and subsequently direct both his legacy and the eventual literary validation of his work by the Nobel Prize committee. This connection also scrutinizes the significance of the Nobel Prize win, which itself signifies perhaps the most dramatic shift in creating Dylan biographies and categorizing him since his rejection of being considered a “legacy artist,” as evidenced by the success of Time Out Of Mind in 1997. As the Bob Dylan legacy changes in the context of his Nobel Prize for Literature award, it is important to emphasize the reasons he earned it, from the value of his writing itself to the spaces that encouraged an eventual laureate.

 

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[1] Sara Danius, “Announcement of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2016,” October 13, 2016, The Swedish Academy, video, 11:46, 9:47.

[2] Bob Dylan, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” recorded January 1965, track 8 on Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, Spotify.

[3] “October 7 – Anniversary of the Six Gallery Reading,” The Allen Ginsberg Project online, October 7, 2015, https://allenginsberg.org/2015/10/october-7-anniversary-of-the-six-gallery-reading/.

[4]  “The Earliest ‘Howl’ Recordings,” The Beat Museum online, October 5, 2020, https://www.kerouac.com/the-earliest-howl-recordings/.

[5] Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, (United States: Viking, 2008), 149.

[6] “The Former Six Gallery, San Francisco,” Retracing Jack Kerouac online, September 23, 2011, https://retracingjackkerouac.com/2011/09/23/the-former-six-gallery-san-francsico/.

[7] Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952-1995, (United Kingdom: Penguin, 2000), 239-240.

[8] Ibid 287

[9] Jack Kerouac, On The Road, (New York: Penguin Group, 1991), 129-135.

[10] Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, (United States: Conari Press, 1996), 2.

[11] Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik, (United Kingdom: Marion Boyars, 2002), 77.

[12] Ibid 78.

[13] Ibid 79.

[14] Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, (United States: Conari Press, 1996), 1.

[15] Ibid 3.

[16] Steven Belletto, “The Beats,” The World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham, (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 170.

[17] Ibid 170.

[18] Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, directed by Martin Scorsese, (2019; White Plains, NY: Grey Water Park Productions), Netflix, 01:05:33

[19] Steven Belletto, “The Beats,” The World of Bob Dylan, edited by Sean Latham, (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 173.

[20] No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese, (2005; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures), Netflix, 01:21:27

[21] Raymond Foye, “Reflections on ‘Dirge,’” Mark Davidson, Parker Fishel, Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine, (United States: Callaway Editions, Incorporated, 2023). 290.

[22] Bob Dylan, “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” recorded January 1965, track 7 on Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, Spotify.

[23] Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” recorded January 2020, track 9 on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Columbia, Spotify.

[24]  I’m Not There, directed by Todd Haynes, (2008; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures), Amazon Prime.

[25] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (United Kingdom: Simon & Schuster UK, 2005), 9.

[26] Ibid 16.

[27] Ibid 17.

[28] Freddy Cristóbal Dominguez, “Review of My Greenwich Village: Dave, Bob, and Me,” The Dylan Review, vol 5.2 Fall/Winter 2023-2024, https://thedylanreview.org/2024/02/21/review-of-my-greenwich-village-dave-bob-and-me/.

[29] Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, (United Kingdom: Crown, 2008), 114.

[30] No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese, (2005; Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures), Netflix, 00:29:38.

[31] Ibid 00:51:51.

[32] Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, (United Kingdom: Crown, 2008), 112-113.

[33] Inside Llewyn Davis, directed by Ethan and Joel Cohen, (2013; Issy-les-Moulineaux, France: StudioCanal), Paramount+, 01:28:40.

[34] Ibid 00:29:43.

[35] Ibid 01:32:12.

[36] Ibid 00:47:55.

[37] Jann Wenner, The Masters: Conversations with Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend, (United States: Little, Brown, 2023), X.

[38] Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own: The Feminist Classic (United Kingdom: Capstone, 2021), 80.

[39] Ibid 97.

[40] Ibid xi.

[41] David Marchese, “Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s,” The New York Times, last modified September 19, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/arts/jann-wenner-the-masters-interview.html.

[42] Edward Helmore, “Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner apologizes for disparaging Black and female artists,” The Guardian, last modified September 18, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/18/jann-wenner -rolling-stone-apology-black-female-artists-interview