Bob Dylan ‘cribbed Moby-Dick notes for Nobel lecture’

Critics claim Bob Dylan plagiarised a students’ guide to Herman Melville’s classic novel for his Nobel Prize speech.

When Bob Dylan delivered the lecture that went with his Nobel Prize for Literature this month, he acknowledged one of his favourite books, Moby-Dick, “makes demands on you”.

Critics claim he eased those demands by plagiarising sections of a students’ guide to Herman Melville’s classic novel. Picking through the 27-minute lecture Dylan delivered on June 4, they say it is peppered with sentences that resemble passages in the SparkNotes primer on Moby-Dick, which he said he read at school.

Ben Greenman was the first to observe that a quote attributed by Dylan to a “bloodthirsty businessman” did not appear anywhere in the novel: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.”

Then Andrea Pitzer, writing for Slate, found a remarkably similar line in an online equivalent to the popular student study guide CliffsNotes. The author of the SparkNotes guide to Moby-Dick described the businessman character as “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness”.

She uncovered at least 20 other instances of similarity between the lecture and the crib notes, although there are no verbatim lifts. In one example Dylan said Captain Ahab “calls Moby the emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil”. SparkNotes says Ahab “sees the whale as the embodiment of evil”.

Dylan has a history of borrowing material. He took the melody of a slave song, No More Auction Block for Me, for Blowin’ In The Wind and has drawn on others’ work for songs, paintings and his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

He has not responded to the Slate allegations. In response to accusations of plagiarism over his 2001 album Love and Theft he told Rolling Stone in 2012: “It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.”

The Times