Half a century ago, Bob Dylan shocked the music world by plugging in an electric guitar and alienating folk purists. For decades he continued to confound expectations, selling millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting. 
 
 Now, Mr. Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that elevates him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett. 
 
 Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels. 
 
 [ Our pop critic on Bob Dylan, the musician | Our book critic on Dylan, the writer ] 
 
 Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” adding, “Great choice.” ||||| There will be some who doubt Dylan’s right to the Nobel prize in literature. There are others who believe he should get a special Nobel just for being Bob Dylan 
 
 In the latest of many distinctions garlanding a career stretching back five-and-a-half decades, Bob Dylan has become the first member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to win the Nobel prize in literature. Some will argue against the award, as they argued against him in the long and infinitely tiresome Dylan v Keats controversy, and as others have contested the meaning and value of every phase and nuance of his output. Others will feel that he deserves the creation of a special Nobel prize simply for being Bob Dylan, however that condition is defined. 
 
 Pop lyrics aren't literature? Tell that to Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan Read more 
 
 So, to confront the familiar argument, can what he does be called literature? And if he is being judged on literary grounds, should Tarantula, his “novel” of the mid-60s (started and abandoned in 1965, widely bootlegged and finally published officially in 1971), be taken as evidence? His fans know the first line by heart – “Aretha / Crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him” – but few reached the end. There was no music, as Dylan himself must have realised when he set it aside. 
 
 Essentially, in the work of Bob Dylan, the words and the music cannot be separated. Just take your favourite Dylan line. Yours might be the ever timely “Where preachers preach of evil fates / Teachers teach that knowledge waits / Can lead to hundred-dollar plates / Goodness hides behind its gates / But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked”, from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) in 1965. Or the eternal “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” (Visions of Johanna, 1966) or the mysterious “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl” (All Along the Watchtower, 1968). Whichever it is, when you say them to yourself, as we all do in times of need, you’ll be hearing his voice, his sound, his music. 
 
 Mine – at this moment, anyway, because the choice is bound to change from time to time when the library is so vast and rich – happens to be a simple line from Brownsville Girl, an 11-minute epic he co-wrote with Sam Shepard in 1986: “Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” This is not “literary”, or poetic by his former standards. There is no “midnight’s broken toll” or “geometry of innocence”. Dylan phrases it so perfectly in a single breath that the meaning is rendered starkly and with profound resonance. That’s what he does. 
 
 The admirable delicacy of the Nobel committee’s citation – “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” – will certainly have provoked a buzz among analysts of Dylan’s career. For one thing, the last two albums released by a man now in his 76th year consisted entirely of material drawn from what has become known as the Great American Songbook: compositions by the very Broadway tunesmiths, in fact, who Dylan the songwriter seemed in the eyes of his own generation to have been invented to destroy. Dylan, however, has always been fond of turning his own iconoclasm on the idea of iconoclasm itself, his protests against being called a protest singer just one example of that refusal to conform to even the freshest of stereotypes. 
 
 Similarly, he never wanted to tear down the walls of Tin Pan Alley. That was an inference drawn by others, useful in the early phase of his career, when he drew from what he had heard in the collection of antique songs on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music – the ballads and blues, the music of hard times – and somehow infused it all with the onrushing anti-authoritarian, anti-deferential spirit of his own era. 
 
 As the Nobel citation correctly suggests, Dylan knitted himself – without anyone realising it, perhaps even him– into the warp and weft of American popular music. Borrowing wholesale from the past, reshuffling melodies, images, characters and attitudes, he helped assemble the components of a rapidly changing present. 
 
 Fifty years ago he used a fairly minor motorcycle accident as an excuse to step away from the spotlight. But the end of the “perfect” Dylan – the one who fused what he had learnt from Woody Guthrie and the symbolist poets with the energy of rock’n’roll, and who mocked the world from behind impenetrable shades – did not mean the end of his creativity. In songs such as Tangled Up in Blue (1975), Blind Willie McTell (1983) and Cross the Green Mountain (2002) he explored ways of playing games with time, voice and perspective, continuing to expand the possibilities of song in ways that disarm all possible criticism of this new and perhaps greatest honour. ||||| Bob Dylan, Titan Of American Music, Wins 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Paul Natkin/Getty Images Paul Natkin/Getty Images 
 
 Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. The prolific musician is the first Nobel winner to have forged a career primarily as a singer-songwriter. What's more, he's also the first American to have won the prize in more than two decades. Not since novelist Toni Morrison won in 1993 has an American claimed the prize. 
 
 Dylan earned the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," according to the citation by the Swedish Academy, the committee that annually decides the recipient of the Nobel Prize. The academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, announced the news Thursday. 
 
 The win comes as something of a shock. As usual, the Swedish Academy did not announce a shortlist of nominees, leaving the betting markets to their best guesses. And while Dylan has enjoyed perennial favor as an outside shot for the award, the prospect that the musician would be the one to break the Americans' long dry spell was regarded as far-fetched — not least because he made his career foremost on the stage, not the printed page. 
 
 Yet few would argue Dylan has been anything but influential, both in the U.S. and beyond its borders. The prolific singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has produced dozens of albums, including The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks. His track "Like a Rolling Stone" has taken on mythic standing in the decades since its release; many, including Dylan himself, have pointed to it as emblematic of a sea change in American music. 
 
 "Tin Pan Alley is gone," Dylan proclaimed in 1985, referring the dominant conventions established by music publishers of the early 20th century. "I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now." 
 
 Dylan, who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, "has the status of an icon," the Swedish Academy wrote in a biographical note. "His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature." 
 
 In an interview following the announcement, Danius elaborated on the Swedish Academy's decision: "He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition, and he is a wonderful sampler — a very original sampler," Danius explained. "For 54 years now he has been at it and reinventing himself, constantly creating a new identity." 
 
 And for his work, he has been amply recognized by critical community. Dylan has won Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. Now, to that trove of honors Dylan has added a Nobel. 
 
 The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded since 1901 to writers who have produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." In that time, 109 prizes have been distributed to 113 writers. This year, the prize carries with it a purse of approximately $900,000 and, as usual, inclusion on literature's most illustrious list — the pantheon of Nobel winners. 
 
 The 75-year-old artist will receive his award in Stockholm on Dec. 10. ||||| Skip in Skip x Embed x Share The Nobel committee is giving up trying to contact Bob Dylan about his recent Nobel Prize win. Video provided by Newsy Newslook 
 
 Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on Oct. 13. (Photo: ABIR SULTAN, EPA) 
 
 Bob Dylan fans rejoiced when the singer-songwriter made history, becoming the first musician to win the Nobel Prize for literature last week. 
 
 But will he accept the honor? 
 
 Speculation swirled Friday when mention of the Nobel Prize was scrubbed from the musician's website, where the phrase "winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature" had previously been added to the page promoting a book of his lyrics. 
 
 Now, it's not there. 
 
 Add to that, NBC News reports the Swedish Academy told local media its board has given up trying to confirm whether he'll even attend a Stockholm banquet honoring him and other Nobel winners in December. 
 
 Dylan, 75, is known for shying from awards recognition and has yet to publicly acknowledge the prestigious win. 
 
 When the Nobel Prize was announced, the Swedish Academy said they were honoring Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." 
 
 Dylan's Nobel Prize for literature marks the first time the award has gone to someone who is mainly seen as a musician. He is the first American to win the prize for literature since Toni Morrison in 1993. 
 
 Dylan, whose songs include Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power. 
 
 The ceremony for Nobel Prize winners takes place on Dec. 10. 
 
 Contributing: Jane Onyanga-Omara 
 
 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2eZteip ||||| FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2015 file photo, Bob Dylan accepts the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year award at the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year show in Los Angeles. The Swedish Academy says it has received... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Feb. 6, 2015 file photo, Bob Dylan accepts the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year award at the 2015 MusiCares Person of the Year show in Los Angeles. The Swedish Academy says it has received... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — Bob Dylan has completed his Nobel course requirements. 
 
 The Swedish Academy announced Monday that it has received the mandatory lecture from the 2016 literature winner, enabling Dylan to collect 8 million Swedish kronor ($922,000) in prize money. Spokeswoman Sara Danius described Dylan's talk in a news release as "extraordinary" and "eloquent." Nobel Prize officials said the 26-minute talk was recorded on Sunday in Los Angeles and an audio clip is posted on the academy's website, www.nobelprize.org. 
 
 Danius said its delivery to the academy meant that "the Dylan adventure is coming to a close." Dylan, widely regarded as the most influential songwriter of his time, received the Nobel Literature diploma and medal in April but was still required to give a speech to receive the money. Dylan took weeks to publicly acknowledge even winning the prize, announced in October and greeted with both joy and dismay that a rock star had received an honor previously given to William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro among others. He did not attend December's Nobel ceremony in Stockholm and his acceptance remarks were read by the United States Ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji. 
 
 Dylan's songs have drawn on literary influences from Beat poetry to Anton Chekhov and his recording was a celebration of books and music and of the common language among art forms. In a warm, raspy delivery, with lounge-style piano in the background, he called Buddy Holly his first musical hero, praised his "imaginative verses" and remembered seeing him in concert not long before Holly died in a 1959 plane crash. 
 
 "Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction," Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. "Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn't know what. It gave me the chills." 
 
 Dylan said that folk songs were his earliest musical vocabulary, but that books such as "Ivanhoe" and "Don Quixote" helped shape his view of the world and inspire him to write songs "unlike anything anybody had ever heard." From the start, he believed in absorbing classical texts and the vernacular of the day. 
 
 He discussed three works at length: "Moby Dick," (a reminder we "see only the surface of things"), "All Quiet On the Western Front" (in which "death is everywhere, nothing else is possible") and "The Odyssey," a "strange, adventurous tale" he likened to such modern pop songs as Simon & Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound." He concluded by noting that Shakespeare's words were meant to be spoken, "Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page." 
 
 "And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days," he said. "I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.'" 
 
 ___ 
 
 This story has been corrected to say that the academy did say where and when the lecture was recorded and fixes the web address. ||||| Representing the Nobel laureate at the prize-giving, the US singer admitted nerves in performance at Swedish academy 
 
 A very nervous Patti Smith initially stumbled through A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall in Stockholm on Saturday in a performance given to mark Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize for literature. 
 
 Making the award, Horace Engdahl, a Swedish literary historian and critic and member of the Swedish academy that awards the prize, responded to international criticism of the choice of a popular lyricist as recipient. 
 
 Engdahl said that when Dylan’s songs were heard first in the 1960s, “all of a sudden much of the bookish poetry in our world felt anaemic”. 
 
 The academy’s choice of Dylan, Engdahl said in Swedish, “seemed daring only beforehand and already seems obvious”. 
 
 And it was an unconventional prize-giving night in more ways than one. Dylan’s failure to attend the august gathering in Stockholm meant that Smith, the American singer most famous for her 1975 album, Horses, and the hit song Because the Night, was attending as his proxy. 
 
 The occasion proved too much for the singer, 69, who faltered after a few verses. Forgetting the lyric “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’”, she apologised quietly but profusely to the jewel-bedecked audience and asked if she could start that section of the song again. “I am so nervous,” she explained. 
 
 Smith was encouraged by applause from the gathered dignatories and members of the Swedish royal family. 
 
 Her performance followed Engdahl’s justificatory speech, which opened with the question: “What brings about the great shifts in the world of literature? Often it is when someone seizes upon a simple, overlooked form, discounted as art in the high sense, and makes it mutate.” 
 
 In this way, Engdahl argued, the novel had once emerged from anecdote and letters, while drama had eventually derived from games and performance. 
 
 “In the distant past all poetry was sung or tunefully recited,” he said. Dylan had dedicated himself to music played for ordinary people and tried to copy it. 
 
 “But when he started to write songs they came out differently,” Engdahl said. “He panned poetry gold, whether on purpose or by accident is irrelevant … he gave back to poetry its elevated style, lost since the romantics.” 
 
 The award, announced in October, was the first to be given to a songwriter. Dylan took two weeks to return the academy’s phone calls or publicly acknowledge the award – which comes with prize money of $870,000 (£734,000) – leading to one member calling him “impolite and arrogant”. 
 
 Dylan, 75, wrote to the academy last month to say he had been left “speechless” by the honour, but that other commitments had made it “unfortunately impossible” for him to attend the ceremony. 
 
 
 
 However, the foundation said that the folk singer would be presented with his prize some time next year, either in Sweden or abroad. 
 
 The no-show has created a stir in Sweden, where it has been perceived as a slight towards the Swedish academy, which awards the literature prize, and the Nobel Foundation. 
 
 Dylan’s Nobel address will be read out by Engdahl at the ceremony. ||||| Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images and SparkNotes. 
 
 If a songwriter can win the Nobel Prize for literature, can CliffsNotes be art? During his official lecture recorded on June 4, laureate Bob Dylan described the influence on him of three literary works from his childhood: The Odyssey, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Moby-Dick. Soon after, writer Ben Greenman noted that in his lecture Dylan seemed to have invented a quote from Moby-Dick. 
 
 Those familiar with Dylan’s music might recall that he winkingly attributed fabricated quotes to Abraham Lincoln in his “Talkin’ World War III Blues.” So Dylan making up an imaginary quote is nothing new. However, I soon discovered that the Moby-Dick line Dylan dreamed up last week seems to be cobbled together out of phrases on the website SparkNotes, the online equivalent of CliffsNotes. 
 
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 In Dylan’s recounting, a “Quaker pacifist priest” tells Flask, the third mate, “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness” (my emphasis). No such line appears anywhere in Herman Melville’s novel. However, SparkNotes’ character list describes the preacher using similar phrasing, as “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness” (again, emphasis mine). 
 
 Following up on this strange echo, I began delving into the two texts side by side and found that many lines Dylan used throughout his Nobel discussion of Moby-Dick appear to have been cribbed even more directly from the site. The SparkNotes summary for Moby-Dick explains, “One of the ships ... carries Gabriel, a crazed prophet who predicts doom.” Dylan’s version reads, “There’s a crazy prophet, Gabriel, on one of the vessels, and he predicts Ahab’s doom.” 
 
 Shortly after, the SparkNotes account relays that “Captain Boomer has lost an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick. ... Boomer, happy simply to have survived his encounter, cannot understand Ahab’s lust for vengeance.” In his lecture, Dylan says, “Captain Boomer—he lost an arm to Moby. But ... he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.” 
 
 Across the 78 sentences in the lecture that Dylan spends describing Moby-Dick, even a cursory inspection reveals that more than a dozen of them appear to closely resemble lines from the SparkNotes site. And most of the key shared phrases in these passages (such as “Ahab’s lust for vengeance” in the above lines) do not appear in the novel Moby-Dick at all. 
 
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 I reached out to Columbia, Dylan’s record label, to try to connect with Dylan or his management for comment, but as of publication time, I have not heard back. 
 
 Theft in the name of art is an ancient tradition, and Dylan has been a magpie since the 1960s. He has also frequently been open about his borrowings. In 2001, he even released an album titled “Love and Theft,” the quotation marks seeming to imply that the album title was itself taken from Eric Lott’s acclaimed history of racial appropriation, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. 
 
 When he started out, Dylan absorbed classic tunes and obscure compositions alike from musicians he met, recording versions that would become more famous than anything by those who taught him the songs or even the original songwriters. His first album included two original numbers and 11 covers. 
 
 Yet in less than three years, he would learn to warp the Americana he collected into stupefyingly original work. Throwing everything from electric guitar and organ to tuba into the musical mix, he began crafting lyrics that combined machine-gun metaphor with motley casts of characters. Less likely to copy whole verses by then, his drive-by invocations of everything from the biblical Abraham to Verlaine and Rimbaud became more hit-and-run than kidnapping. The lyrics accumulated into chaotic, juggling poetry from a trickster willing to drop a ball sometimes. They worked even when they shouldn’t have. 
 
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 In the past several years, Dylan seems to have expanded his appropriation. His 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One is filled with unacknowledged attributions. In more recent years, he has returned to recording covers, as many legends do. In Dylan’s case, his past three albums (five discs in all) have been composed of standards. 
 
 Bob Dylan Is a Great Singer The Nobel laureate thinks we should laud his singing as much as his “poetry.” He’s right. 
 
 Dylan remains so reliant on appropriation that tracing his sourcing has become a cottage industry. For more than a decade, writer Scott Warmuth, an admiring Ahab in pursuit, has tracked Dylan lyrics and writings to an astonishing range of texts, from multiple sentences copied out of a New Orleans travel brochure to lifted phrases and imagery from former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Warmuth dove into Dylan’s Nobel lecture last week, too, and found that the phrase “faith in a meaningful world” from the CliffsNotes description of All Quiet on the Western Front also shows up in Dylan’s talk (but not in the book). 
 
 Even many of the paintings Dylan produces as an artist are reproductions of well-known images, such as a photo from Henri Cartier-Bresson. For Dylan, recapitulation has replaced invention. 
 
 If the Moby-Dick portion of his Nobel lecture was indeed cribbed from SparkNotes, then what is the world to make of it? Perhaps the use of SparkNotes can be seen as a sendup of the prestige-prize economy. Either way, through Dylan’s Nobel lecture, SparkNotes material may well join Duchamp’s urinal and Andy Warhol’s fake Brillo pad boxes as a functional commodity now made immortal. 
 
 It’s worth mentioning that Dylan turned in his lecture just before the six-month deadline, ensuring that he would get paid. In the interest of settling any potential moral debt, I would encourage him to throw some of his $923,000 prize to whoever wrote the original version of the online summary.
– "Bob Dylan" was one of the top Twitter trends Thursday thanks to the troubadour taking home the Nobel Prize for Literature. But while most of social media is beaming at his newest honor, Scottish author Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel Trainspotting, isn't terribly pleased, the AP reports. Welsh spent much of Thursday morning on Twitter retweeting posts that trashed Dylan's win, and tweeting: "I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies." His main beef appears to be the separation of a metaphorical church and state—in this case, songs and lit—that he thinks should exist, adding, "If you're a 'music' fan, look it up in the dictionary. Then 'literature'. Then compare and contrast." Other takes on Dylan's new laureate status: The Wall Street Journal lists feedback from major authors, from the gushing—Salman Rushdie writes on Twitter, "From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice"—to the eyerolling, including satirical writer Gary Shteyngart's take: "I totally get the Nobel committee. Reading books is hard." Jay Perini gives a thumbs-up at CNN, noting how Dylan's songs "speak to our deepest concerns" and how he's "filled our heads with language that both interprets and transforms the realities we confront." At the Guardian, Richard Williams looks at whether music and literature can actually be successfully linked (in terms of a Nobel Prize), and he breaks it down line by line to show the "profound resonance" of Dylan's lyrics. Robert Chalmers makes the slightly uncomfortable observation for GQ that "everything would be so much more simple if he were dead," as Dylan would have ascended to legendary status. But Chalmers still jumps on the pro-Dylan bandwagon, noting, "His voice may, like the Havana cigars and bourbon to which it is often lazily compared, be an acquired taste, but Dylan is responsible, as much as Billie Holiday, for reinventing the whole style of popular singing." Meanwhile, a naysayer singing the Black "Eating Crow" Blues: Alex Shephard, who wrote last week for the New Republic that "Bob Dylan 100 percent is not going to win. Stop saying Bob Dylan should win the Nobel Prize."