Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

At 16, Bob used to tell John Bucklen, “You are my main man”—high praise in 1950s patois. Bucklen’s family was working-class, mainstream American, probably of English descent. John also had that sense of being “bad, man, bad.” Even with those nice, middle-class boys from the Twin Cities whom Bob met at the Theodor Herzl summer camp near Webster, Wisconsin, he could find some “bad” guys to befriend.

Bob Dylan's Early Bands as a Child

In 1968, Le Roy Hoikkala, a sky, slight electronics technician, told Rober Shelton: “I met Bob downtown one day and we got to talking about music. We were in eighth grade, and I was very much involved in playing drums. Monte Edwardson was guitar player, and the three of us got together, around 1955, in Bob’s garage for some sessions.

Words and Music—Traditional

The emotional tethers of Judaism are as long and strong as the umbilicus. First- and second-generation offspring of Jewish immigrants found many powerful reasons for assimilating into the American grain. In the New World, the biblical-cum-medieval Jewish traditions had no apparent appeals and many obvious drawbacks.

Bob Dylan was born on May 24th 1941 in St Mary's Hospital, Duluth, Minnesota. 

Although it may not have been widely noted at the time in Duluth, the literary world of 1941 mourned three of its giants. James Joyce died in Switzerland. F Scott Fitzgerald and Sherwood Anderson, two of the writers whom critic Maxwell Geismar later numbered among “the last of the provincials,” also died early in the year.

Meanwhile, Bob Dylan's mother, Beatty had a news bulletin of literary and musical significance. “Abe,” she exclaimed. “Abe, I feel it! I think the baby is coming.”

No other figure from the world of American popular music, of this or any other era, has attracted the volume of critical attention, much of it quite original and perceptive, that Bob Dylan has. Just as significantly, no popular culture figure has ever been adopted into the curricula of college and university language and literature departments in the way Dylan has; critics have called James Joyce “God’s gift to English departments,” but Dylan is no less deserving of that designation.