SOURCE: Bloom, James D. “Out of Minnesota: Mythography and Generational Poetics in the Writings of Bob Dylan and F. Scott Fitzgerald.” American Studies 40, no. 1 (spring 1999): 5-21.

In the following essay, Bloom draws parallels between Fitzgerald and singer Bob Dylan's life and works, arguing that both were anti-prophets who made myths of themselves and at the same time undermined those myths.

Affinities

“You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. You're very well read. It's well known.” So runs a memorable line in Bob Dylan's “Ballad of a Thin Man” on his 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited. Not only did this song provide “an instant catchphrase for the moral, generational, and racial divisions” that, in Greil Marcus' formulation, separated the cognoscenti from the “squares” (8-9); this album also marked Dylan's controversial introduction to LP buyers of his paradigm-shifting hybrid, “folk rock.” Brian Morton's 1991 novel, The Dylanist, describes the appeal of...