httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
In 1962, Mr. Dylan signed a contract with the record producer John Hammond for his debut album, “Bob Dylan.” He was only 22 when he performed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, singing “When the Ship Comes In,” with Joan Baez, and “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a retelling of the murder of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers, before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
“As the ’60s wore on,” Giles Harvey wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2010, “Dylan grew increasingly frustrated with what he came to regard as the pious sloganeering and doctrinaire leftist politics of the folk milieu.” He “Began writing a kind of visionary nonsense verse, in which the rough, ribald, lawless America of the country’s traditional folk music collided with a surreal ensemble of characters from history, literature, legend, the Bible, and many other places besides.”
David Hajdu, a music critic for The Nation who has written extensively about Mr. Dylan and his contemporaries, said that the Nobel recognition was long overdue and that it may be intended in part to honor the broader American music movement that Mr. Dylan emerged from.
“It’s partly a recognition of the whole tradition that Bob Dylan represents, so it’s partly a retroactive award for Robert Johnson and Hank Williams and Smokey Robinson and the Beatles,” Mr. Hajdu said in an interview on Thursday.
In giving the literature prize to Mr. Dylan, the Nobel committee may also be recognizing that the gap between high art and more commercial art forms has narrowed.
The academy added: “Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured persistently, an undertaking called the ‘Never-Ending Tour.’ Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature.”
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the author of a 2013 Op-Ed essay arguing that Bob Dylan should receive a Nobel Prize.