I nominated Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize. You’re welcome. [View all]

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For 15 years, I recommended the poet and musician for the honor he finally won.



Bob Dylan aboard a train.

October 14 at 5:06 PM
By Gordon Ball
Gordon Ball is Visiting Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches about poetry, creative writing and the literature of the Beat Generation.

For decades I’ve admired the work of Bob Dylan, whom I first saw at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, but it was in August of 1996 that I first wrote the Nobel Committee, nominating Dylan for its literature prize. The idea to do so originated not with me but with two Dylan aficionados in Norway, journalist Reidar Indrebø and attorney Gunnar Lunde, who had recently written Allen Ginsberg about a Nobel for Dylan. Ginsberg’s office then asked if I’d write a nominating letter. (Nominators must be professors of literature or linguistics, past laureates, presidents of national writers’ groups, or members of the Swedish Academy or similar groups.) Over the next few months, several other professors, including Stephen Scobie, Daniel Karlin, and Betsy Bowden, endorsed Dylan for the Nobel. I would go on to nominate Dylan for the next dozen years. This year, he finally won.

Examining prize criteria, I learned that Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will specified that in literature the work must be “the most outstanding…of an idealistic tendency,” and that “during the preceding year” the honoree must “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” Could as much be said about Dylan’s lyrics? Can an icon of popular culture, a “song and dance man,” stand shoulder-to-shoulder with literary giants? Bobby Zimmerman alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Gunter Grass?

Idealism and benefiting humanity often, of course, move hand in hand, and Dylan’s idealistic, activist songs have indeed helped change our world. His 1963 Tom Paine Award (an earlier recipient, Bertrand Russell, was one of three philosophers — not counting Sartre — to win the Nobel in literature) came after “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Oxford Town,” and other works, as well as his going South to help with voter registration drives. An attitude aired in his 1965 “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”—“…even the President of the United States / sometimes must have / to stand naked” — may have helped revise our view of presidential authority, encouraging inquiry into what became Watergate.

For a generation raised in conformity, Dylan validated imagination and independence of thought; his work is emblematic of the creativity of the 1960s in the U.S., and has affected others across the globe. Asked in a Der Spiegel interview if growing up in Germany he had an “American dream,” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer replied, “Not an American dream, but my very own dream of freedom. That was for me the music of Bob Dylan.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/10/14/i-nominated-bob-dylan-for-the-nobel-prize-youre-welcome/?utm_term=.209bc9d4ea0f