Chronicles: Volume One

Bob Dylan is a legendary American singer-songwriter, Nobel Prize laureate, and the author of Chronicles. The memoir traces several key periods of Dylan’s life and career between the 1960s and 80s.

Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, Dylan grew up in the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota. He grew up with “a witches’ brew of pastimes” common to small-town America: “swimming holes and fishing ponds, sledding and something called bumper riding, where you grab hold of a tail bumper on a car and ride through the snow, Fourth of July fireworks, tree houses” (232). He was “[biding] [his] time,” aware “there was a bigger world out there” but in no rush to join it (232).

In 1959, Dylan took the bus to Minneapolis and stayed with a cousin in his fraternity house while he began to incorporate himself into the growing folk music scene. His lodgings were simple, but “[f]olk music was all [he] needed to exist” (236), and it quickly became an all-consuming obsession. Dylan spent all of his time playing and listening to folk music, frequenting folk clubs and record stores. Arriving in New York marked the true start of Dylan’s project of self-discovery and creation.