BOB DYLAN ON LENNY BRUCE: MORE OF AN OUTLAW THAN YOU EVER WERE

This Essay seeks to compare and contrast two contemporary performing artists: Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce. Bruce and Dylan both became artists in the middle of twentieth-century America—in the same stew of ideas, myths, and shared assumptions. Both experienced the same winds of change, albeit at different stages of life, in the 1950s and 1960s, the post-World War II Cold War period, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. Both responded to these winds of change, and in so doing, transcended and transformed their respective art forms.