Chronicles: Volume One

Dylan was born in 1941 as World War II raged in Europe. It was a time when “you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning” (28). His father didn’t fight in the war because of polio, but all his uncles shipped out overseas. They came home and never spoke of it. By the time Dylan was in grade school, the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR was in full swing, instilling fear in his generation. However, by the time he was a young man in New York, the Red Scare was over, even though there were “plenty” of aspiring “[r]adicals of all stripes” around (30).

Dylan spent his first months in New York City crashing on couches, floors, and spare rooms. He especially enjoyed staying with Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel, a couple who lived south of Canal Street. He often returned home just before dawn and woke in the afternoon after Ray and Chloe had left. He spent the afternoons listening to the radio and the sounds of the city, the trains and church bells, and looking out the window imagining the myriad stories of New York’s residents. He scanned the radio “for songs with folk connotations” (32), but most of what he heard “reflected nothing but milk and sugar and not the real Jekyll and Hyde themes of the times” (34).