my back pages: an unwritten book

Existing biographies of Bob Dylan are not what they claim to be. Instead, they tell the life story of one Robert Allen Zimmerman, born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, and raised in the nearby town of Hibbing. When, twenty years later, Robert Zimmerman moved to New York City and became a professional musician — first a singer, then a writer of songs as well — he started calling himself Bob Dylan, and simultaneously began a second career as a fabulist of himself. (Perhaps one might say that self-mythologizing is his first career, with music a distant second.) For instance, while Zimmerman admitted that he had been born in Duluth, he never admitted to having been raised in Minnesota but insisted instead that he had lived in Gallup, New Mexico, and had, perhaps even before entering his teen years, worked in a carnival. These statements were of course lies, and indeed almost everything that he has ever said about himself, in his own writing and in interviews, has had at best, and rarely, a…