Bob Dylan Reveals Himself Through 66 Songs

As an author of all kinds of work—songs, poetry, a memoir, radio-show commentary, the occasional film script or —Bob Dylan has been engaged for more than 60 years in an inquiry into authorship itself. From his earliest days as a folk singer in MacDougal Street coffeehouses, he has been known for drawing freely, often brazenly, from the work of his predecessors (and occasionally his contemporaries), employing the “folk process”—through which each singer makes additions or alterations to a shared body of material—to produce work idiosyncratically his own. In , his 2004 book of impressionistic reminiscences, Dylan seems to have and an assortment of other sources to construct a collage representing his memories and ideas. Even with his , many of which appear to be based on still frames from movies and published photographs, Dylan has . His whole body of work is largely concerned with the question, “Who