[David Post] Bob Dylan wins Nobel Prize for Literature

This just in:  Bob Dylan has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

An inspired choice – from an organization that has not always made inspired choices.  The list of great authors – as in earth-shakingly, mind-numbingly, inarguably great authors – who did NOT receive the Nobel Prize is a Who’s Who of the greatest writers of the last 100 years:  Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, Jorge Luis Borges, Henrik Ibsen, Bertold Brecht, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, …

While the Winner’s Circle has included Sully Prudhomme, Sinclair Lewis, Harry Martinson, Boris Pasternak,  José Echegaray, Rudolf Eucken, Verner von Heidenstam, Erik A. Karlfeldt, Frans Sillanpää, and Pearl Buck.

It is difficult to understand exactly why we pay so much attention to it; it’s just a bunch of Swedish intellectuals with no particular claim to be the arbiters of great art sitting around and picking a favorite.  But we do – in large part, I think, because we think everyone else is paying attention to it, in theory at least all across the planet.

And in any event, it surely is a net plus for the world that once a year a significant portion of the world’s attention is fixed, for even a few moments, on great writers (and sometimes not-so-great writers) and on what makes them great (and not-so-great).

And Dylan is worthy of the attention. To those of us who grew up with him singing on our own personal soundtracks – “Freewheelin'” was, I believe, the first album I ever bought with my own money, and it may well have been the best three bucks I ever spent;  I’ve said for many years that I think we’ve been fortunate to have been alive during the Bob Dylan era – the choice surely brings a smile to our faces.  The greatest song-writer in English, certainly since George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and possibly ever.  I have a strong feeling that 100 or 200 years from now, when people may have forgotten all about Andre Gide (1947), Heinrich Boll (1972), and Eyvind Johnson (1974), they’ll still be playing and singing Dylan’s songs.

Herein my list of the five greatest Dylan albums of all time: Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Freewheelin’, and Time out of Mind.  I’m sure that others will have their own personal lists …

So: Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing Minnesota, we salute you!