I suspect many readers might associate [Bob Dylan] with one of the shortest phases of his career, the time from 1963 to '65 when he wrote his most famous "protest songs," like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"

[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

In honor of his new Nobel, this hard-core Dylanophile wants to share with you a song or two from each of his many incarnations. Because you deserve to know.

In late [Bob] Dylan, music is the key to immortality, even though the summer days are long gone.

Folk music had long been political but [Bob] Dylan's poetry took it to a new level.

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.

[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.