Read next Meet Jonas Blue, the DJ behind this year’s biggest pop bangers Meet Jonas Blue, the DJ behind this year’s biggest pop bangers The DJ on his fail-safe formula for pop success and working in a bar with Sam Smith pre-fame. Many of these writers are also interested in navel-gazing Great American Male questions, and the Nobel has moved on since it gave the prize to Hemingway. Kundera seems like a Nobel contender in a lot of ways, but he isn’t even the best Czech writer of his generation (that’d be Ivan Klima) and he hasn’t done good work in a long, long time. And even those who have been published in the U.S. are not widely read. Dylan challenged us again and again: "How many deaths will it take till they know / That too many people have died?"  Story highlights Jay Parini: Bob Dylan has written songs that speak to our deepest concerns 
 
 Other singers have summed up a generation, but Dylan wrote words to his songs, he says 
 
 Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College. 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. But none of these elder statesmen and -women really fits that bill. Tell that to Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan Read more 
 
 So, to confront the familiar argument, can what he does be called literature?
– "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."