The Western Dreams of a Nobel Outlaw

Mama, take this badge off of me I can’t use it anymore It’s getting’ dark, too dark for me to see I feel like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.

—Bob Dylan, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”

- Stuart Rosebrook

IN 1978, Bob Dylan told a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine, “I’m sure of my dream self. I live in my dreams. I don’t really live in the actual world.”

On October 13, 2016, almost 55 years to the day and month when Dylan went into Columbia Recording Studios’ Studio A in New York City to record his self-titled debut album Bob Dylan, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius announced that the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature had been awarded to the Duluth, Minnesota, native “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” She also said, “He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition.”