Half a century ago, Bob Dylan shocked the music world by plugging in an electric guitar and alienating folk purists. For decades he continued to confound expectations, selling millions of records with dense, enigmatic songwriting. 
 
 Now, Mr. Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era, has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, an honor that elevates him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett. 
 
 Mr. Dylan, 75, is the first musician to win the award, and his selection on Thursday is perhaps the most radical choice in a history stretching back to 1901. In choosing a popular musician for the literary world’s highest honor, the Swedish Academy, which awards the prize, dramatically redefined the boundaries of literature, setting off a debate about whether song lyrics have the same artistic value as poetry or novels. 
 
 [ Our pop critic on Bob Dylan, the musician | Our book critic on Dylan, the writer ] 
 
 Some prominent writers celebrated Mr. Dylan’s literary achievements, including Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie, who called Mr. Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” adding, “Great choice.” ||||| There will be some who doubt Dylan’s right to the Nobel prize in literature. There are others who believe he should get a special Nobel just for being Bob Dylan 
 
 In the latest of many distinctions garlanding a career stretching back five-and-a-half decades, Bob Dylan has become the first member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to win the Nobel prize in literature. Some will argue against the award, as they argued against him in the long and infinitely tiresome Dylan v Keats controversy, and as others have contested the meaning and value of every phase and nuance of his output. Others will feel that he deserves the creation of a special Nobel prize simply for being Bob Dylan, however that condition is defined. 
 
 Pop lyrics aren't literature? Tell that to Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan Read more 
 
 So, to confront the familiar argument, can what he does be called literature? And if he is being judged on literary grounds, should Tarantula, his “novel” of the mid-60s (started and abandoned in 1965, widely bootlegged and finally published officially in 1971), be taken as evidence? His fans know the first line by heart – “Aretha / Crystal jukebox queen of hymn & him” – but few reached the end. There was no music, as Dylan himself must have realised when he set it aside. 
 
 Essentially, in the work of Bob Dylan, the words and the music cannot be separated. Just take your favourite Dylan line. Yours might be the ever timely “Where preachers preach of evil fates / Teachers teach that knowledge waits / Can lead to hundred-dollar plates / Goodness hides behind its gates / But even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked”, from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) in 1965. Or the eternal “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?” (Visions of Johanna, 1966) or the mysterious “Two riders were approaching / The wind began to howl” (All Along the Watchtower, 1968). Whichever it is, when you say them to yourself, as we all do in times of need, you’ll be hearing his voice, his sound, his music. 
 
 Mine – at this moment, anyway, because the choice is bound to change from time to time when the library is so vast and rich – happens to be a simple line from Brownsville Girl, an 11-minute epic he co-wrote with Sam Shepard in 1986: “Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content.” This is not “literary”, or poetic by his former standards. There is no “midnight’s broken toll” or “geometry of innocence”. Dylan phrases it so perfectly in a single breath that the meaning is rendered starkly and with profound resonance. That’s what he does. 
 
 The admirable delicacy of the Nobel committee’s citation – “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” – will certainly have provoked a buzz among analysts of Dylan’s career. For one thing, the last two albums released by a man now in his 76th year consisted entirely of material drawn from what has become known as the Great American Songbook: compositions by the very Broadway tunesmiths, in fact, who Dylan the songwriter seemed in the eyes of his own generation to have been invented to destroy. Dylan, however, has always been fond of turning his own iconoclasm on the idea of iconoclasm itself, his protests against being called a protest singer just one example of that refusal to conform to even the freshest of stereotypes. 
 
 Similarly, he never wanted to tear down the walls of Tin Pan Alley. That was an inference drawn by others, useful in the early phase of his career, when he drew from what he had heard in the collection of antique songs on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music – the ballads and blues, the music of hard times – and somehow infused it all with the onrushing anti-authoritarian, anti-deferential spirit of his own era. 
 
 As the Nobel citation correctly suggests, Dylan knitted himself – without anyone realising it, perhaps even him– into the warp and weft of American popular music. Borrowing wholesale from the past, reshuffling melodies, images, characters and attitudes, he helped assemble the components of a rapidly changing present. 
 
 Fifty years ago he used a fairly minor motorcycle accident as an excuse to step away from the spotlight. But the end of the “perfect” Dylan – the one who fused what he had learnt from Woody Guthrie and the symbolist poets with the energy of rock’n’roll, and who mocked the world from behind impenetrable shades – did not mean the end of his creativity. In songs such as Tangled Up in Blue (1975), Blind Willie McTell (1983) and Cross the Green Mountain (2002) he explored ways of playing games with time, voice and perspective, continuing to expand the possibilities of song in ways that disarm all possible criticism of this new and perhaps greatest honour. ||||| Bob Dylan, Titan Of American Music, Wins 2016 Nobel Prize In Literature 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Paul Natkin/Getty Images Paul Natkin/Getty Images 
 
 Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature. The prolific musician is the first Nobel winner to have forged a career primarily as a singer-songwriter. What's more, he's also the first American to have won the prize in more than two decades. Not since novelist Toni Morrison won in 1993 has an American claimed the prize. 
 
 Dylan earned the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," according to the citation by the Swedish Academy, the committee that annually decides the recipient of the Nobel Prize. The academy's permanent secretary, Sara Danius, announced the news Thursday. 
 
 The win comes as something of a shock. As usual, the Swedish Academy did not announce a shortlist of nominees, leaving the betting markets to their best guesses. And while Dylan has enjoyed perennial favor as an outside shot for the award, the prospect that the musician would be the one to break the Americans' long dry spell was regarded as far-fetched — not least because he made his career foremost on the stage, not the printed page. 
 
 Yet few would argue Dylan has been anything but influential, both in the U.S. and beyond its borders. The prolific singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has produced dozens of albums, including The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks. His track "Like a Rolling Stone" has taken on mythic standing in the decades since its release; many, including Dylan himself, have pointed to it as emblematic of a sea change in American music. 
 
 "Tin Pan Alley is gone," Dylan proclaimed in 1985, referring the dominant conventions established by music publishers of the early 20th century. "I put an end to it. People can record their own songs now." 
 
 Dylan, who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in 1941, "has the status of an icon," the Swedish Academy wrote in a biographical note. "His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature." 
 
 In an interview following the announcement, Danius elaborated on the Swedish Academy's decision: "He is a great poet in the English-speaking tradition, and he is a wonderful sampler — a very original sampler," Danius explained. "For 54 years now he has been at it and reinventing himself, constantly creating a new identity." 
 
 And for his work, he has been amply recognized by critical community. Dylan has won Grammys, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S. Now, to that trove of honors Dylan has added a Nobel. 
 
 The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded since 1901 to writers who have produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction." In that time, 109 prizes have been distributed to 113 writers. This year, the prize carries with it a purse of approximately $900,000 and, as usual, inclusion on literature's most illustrious list — the pantheon of Nobel winners. 
 
 The 75-year-old artist will receive his award in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
– "Bob Dylan" was one of the top Twitter trends Thursday thanks to the troubadour taking home the Nobel Prize for Literature. But while most of social media is beaming at his newest honor, Scottish author Irvine Welsh, who wrote the novel Trainspotting, isn't terribly pleased, the AP reports. Welsh spent much of Thursday morning on Twitter retweeting posts that trashed Dylan's win, and tweeting: "I'm a Dylan fan, but this is an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies." His main beef appears to be the separation of a metaphorical church and state—in this case, songs and lit—that he thinks should exist, adding, "If you're a 'music' fan, look it up in the dictionary. Then 'literature'. Then compare and contrast." Other takes on Dylan's new laureate status: The Wall Street Journal lists feedback from major authors, from the gushing—Salman Rushdie writes on Twitter, "From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice"—to the eyerolling, including satirical writer Gary Shteyngart's take: "I totally get the Nobel committee. Reading books is hard." Jay Perini gives a thumbs-up at CNN, noting how Dylan's songs "speak to our deepest concerns" and how he's "filled our heads with language that both interprets and transforms the realities we confront." At the Guardian, Richard Williams looks at whether music and literature can actually be successfully linked (in terms of a Nobel Prize), and he breaks it down line by line to show the "profound resonance" of Dylan's lyrics. Robert Chalmers makes the slightly uncomfortable observation for GQ that "everything would be so much more simple if he were dead," as Dylan would have ascended to legendary status. But Chalmers still jumps on the pro-Dylan bandwagon, noting, "His voice may, like the Havana cigars and bourbon to which it is often lazily compared, be an acquired taste, but Dylan is responsible, as much as Billie Holiday, for reinventing the whole style of popular singing." Meanwhile, a naysayer singing the Black "Eating Crow" Blues: Alex Shephard, who wrote last week for the New Republic that "Bob Dylan 100 percent is not going to win. Stop saying Bob Dylan should win the Nobel Prize."