Bob Dylan is one of the most influential figures in the history of popular music, a singer-songwriter whose poetic lyrics and restless reinvention transformed the art of the song and helped define the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in the iron-mining town of Hibbing, he fell under the spell of folk and blues music and adopted the name Dylan as he set out to make his way.
Arriving in New York's Greenwich Village folk scene in the early 1960s, he quickly emerged as a startling new talent. His early songs, including "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'," became anthems of the civil rights and anti-war movements and made him the reluctant voice of a generation.
Dylan refused to be confined. In 1965, to the dismay of folk purists, he embraced electric rock music, producing a torrent of dazzling, surreal, and emotionally charged songs — "Like a Rolling Stone" among them — that expanded the possibilities of popular music and influenced countless artists.
Across the following decades he continued to evolve restlessly, moving through folk, rock, country, gospel, and beyond, and producing a vast and varied body of work while touring almost ceaselessly. His towering achievement was recognized in 2016 when he became the first songwriter to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor confirming his place among the great poetic voices of the age.