An intimate collection of love letters, in which a teenage Bob Dylan tells his high school sweetheart that he intends to change his name and sell a million records, is for sale in Boston.
The young man from Hibbing, Minnesota, then still known as Bob Zimmerman, wrote the 42 letters, totaling 150 pages, to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959.
The letters, which are being auctioned by RR Auction, have never been made public and shed light on a period in the life of this inescapable figure in the history of American popular music, about which little is known.
“This archive is one of the most culturally significant 20th-century archives we’ve ever made available,” said RR Auction Executive Vice President Bobby Livingston, a huge fan of Dylan.
The collection, which includes a lavish Valentine’s Day card, is a “first-person account of Dylan’s formative years,” he said.
Barbara Ann Hewitt’s daughter found the letters after her mother died in 2020.
The documents, along with the original envelopes with Dylan’s handwriting, will be auctioned as a single lot, with a starting value of $250,000, with the auction closing on November 17.
RR Auction has not released the exact contents of the letters in advance, but they contain eternal and universal concerns of teenagers: clothes, cars and musical tastes, the auction house explained.
Dylan, now 81, also included short poems and declared his love for Hewitt.
Perhaps most impressively, the musician envisioned his future success.
In one of the letters, he asks Hewitt for feedback on the name change, mentions Little Willie and Elston, and writes about selling a million records when, in fact, he ended up selling around 125 million.
🇧🇷[As cartas] They really give you an idea of how it’s going to be presented. It shows that Dylan dreamed it all and it came true, he predicted it,” said Livingston.
Like most teen romance novels, this one too came to an end.
In one of the last letters, the future Nobel laureate in Literature asks Hewitt to return the photographs he sent him.
However, it seems that Dylan never forgot his girlfriend. Hewitt’s daughter told RR Auction that Dylan called her mother at one point in the late 1960s, after the musician’s rise to fame, and asked her to move to California. But Barbara rejected him.
Hewitt was red-haired, and Livingston further speculated that Dylan’s references to red-haired women in some songs were inspired by his ex-girlfriend, including “Tangled Up in Blue”, which asks “if her hair is still red”.
Bob Dylan is an inescapable figure in the history of American popular music, with almost 40 albums – the last of them released in 2020 – and more than 125 million records sold worldwide.
In 2016 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for, according to the Swedish Academy, “having created new poetic expressions in the field of American music”.
In Portugal, the author’s literary work has been published by Relógio D’Água, namely the first (and so far only) volume of the autobiography, “Crónicas”, the experimental fiction book “Tarântula” (from 1966), and the two volumes of “Songs” (1962-1973 and 1974-2001).
Source: TSF
