Dylan's Story

Bob Dylan wasn’t inaugurating a new cultural movement. He was trying desperately to climb aboard a fast-moving train. Born Robert Zimmerman, he was a native of Hibbing, Minnesota, a working-class town in the heart of the state’s famous Iron Range. His childhood was entirely conventional. Raised in a tan, two-story stucco house, he had grown up in a close-knit Jewish family. His father, Abraham Zimmerman, sold furniture and appliances; his mother, Beatty, was a clerk at Feldman’s Department Store. A solitary child, Dylan spent his early years writing and reading poetry and crooning along to radio broadcasts of his idol, Hank Williams. When rock ’n’ roll became the rage, he traded Williams for Elvis. When he discovered his first Woody Guthrie albums—probably just before or during his brief stint at the University of Minnesota—he turned to folk music.

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