Bob Dylan is the most lauded and respected songwriter alive today and, perhaps, the most importance lyricist of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen in 1941 in Duluth MN. In 1959, Zimmerman entered the University of Minnesota and began performing as Bob Dylan at clubs in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The following year Bob Dylan went to New York, performed in Greenwich Village folk clubs, and spent much time in the hospital room of his hero Woody Guthrie. In 1961 Columbia Records signed Bob Dylan to a contract.

The following year, in 1962, his debut album hit shelves with only two original songs.

Fortunately, in 1963 The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan appeared, with all original songs. It included the legendary track "Blowin' in the Wind." After several more important acoustic/folk albums, and tours with Joan Baez, Bob Dylan launched into a new electric/acoustic format with 1965's Bringing It All Back Home.

A watershed album in annals of rock history, Bringing It All Back trumpeted the arrival of what would become folk-rock. The D.A Pennebaker documentary Don't Look Back was filmed at this time.

Bob Dylan was nearly killed in 1966 in a horrific motorcycle accident. Bob Dylan quickly withdrew for a time of introspection.

His next several albums were hard-rocking affairs, before Dylan settled into some country sounds.

As the sixties rolled into the seventies, director Sam Peckinpah to compose the score for, and appear in, his new film, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, approached Bob Dylan.

In 1974 Bob Dylan and The Band went on tour, releasing his first number one album, Planet Waves. It was followed a year later by another platinum-selling album called Blood on the Tracks.

After several Rolling Thunder tours, Bob Dylan stunned the music world again by his release of the fundamentalist Christrian album "Slow Train Coming," a cut from which won Dylan his first Grammy. Many tours and albums later, on the eve of a European tour May 1997, he was stricken with an infection in his heart; he recovered and appeared in Rome that September at the request of the Pope. Bob Dylan received the Kennedy Center Award for artistic excellence.

Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind, his first album of original material in seven years, in the fall of 1997. Time Out of Mind received his strongest reviews in years and unexpectedly debuted in the Top Ten. Time Out of Mind received three Grammy Awards - Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album and Best Male Rock Vocal.

In 2001, Bob Dylan's song "Things Have Changed", penned for the film Wonder Boys, won a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song and an Academy Award for Best Song.

Love and Theft was released on September 11, 2001. Bob Dylan produced the album himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, and its distinctive sound owes much to the accompanists. The album was critically well received, nominated for several Grammy awards, and sold strongly.

2001's Love and Theft was controversial due to some similarities between the lyrics of the song "Floater" to Japanese writer Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza.

2003 saw the release of the film Masked & Anonymous, a creative collaboration with television producer Larry Charles, featured many well-known actors. Dylan and Charles co-wrote the film under the pseudonyms Rene Fontaine and Sergei Petrov.

In 2005 preproduction began on a film entitled I'm Not There: Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan.

In 2006, Bob Dylan released a new called Modern Times.