Robert Allen Zimmerman born May 24, 1941, and also known as Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter. Many consider him to be one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
Bob Dylan was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, and reared in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Range west of Lake Superior. Dylan’s paternal grandparents, Anna Kirghiz and Zigman Zimmerman, immigrated to the United States from Odesa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) following the pogroms against Jews in 1905.
Florence and Ben Stone, his maternal grandparents, were Lithuanian Jews who immigrated to the United States in 1902. Dylan said in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, that his paternal grandmother’s family hailed from the Kazman area of Kars Province in northern Turkey.
Why is Bob Dylan so famous?
Bob Dylan is widely regarded as the most influential composer in the pop/rock genre, so much so that he is the current Nobel Laureate in Literature and the first songwriter to receive the award.
It’s arguable if a composer deserves the award more than a novelist.
But, if we believe that a songwriter receiving this award is permissible (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were sung before they were written down, after all), there is no more deserving inaugural recipient than Dylan.
