In the fall of 1959, Zimmerman enrolled briefly at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He lived in a Jewish frat house, Sigma Alpha Mu, for a few months, but gravitated toward Dinkytown, a bohemian neighborhood between the campus and the Mississippi River. Like many a member of Minneapolis’s mini-Bohemia, he made his way to the Ten O’Clock Scholar, a coffeehouse with a four-inch elevated platform in the front window from which performers entertained the customers and passed the hat. When Zimmerman asked if he could play, the manager asked him his name. He blurted out “Bob Dylan,” and from then on, that’s who he became. “I needed a name in a hurry and I picked that one,” Dylan told Anthony Scaduto, his first serious biographer. “It just came to me as I was standing there in ‘The Scholar.’” In Robert Shelton’s biography No Direction Home, Echo Helstrom, Dylan’s Hibbing girlfriend, says that Dylan had already come up with the name by the time he was a junior in high school. “I know what I’m going to call myself,” he told her one day in 1958. “I’ve got this great name—Bob Dillon.”

Dylan hooked up with a local folksinger, “Spider” John Koerner, who owned a trove of rare folk-music recordings from the Library of Congress and Folkways, Moe Asch’s stubborn little record label with the thick cardboard sleeves that introduced the world to Leadbelly (né Huddie Ledbetter), Big Bill Broonzy, Doc Watson, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Woody Guthrie.

In the fall of 1960, a Dinkytown connection turned Dylan on to Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie’s 1943 autobiography. Woodrow Wilson Guthrie hailed from Okemah, Oklahoma, a farm town on the Colorado River made up of equal parts Cherokee, Anglo, and black, the son of a land speculator well acquainted with the frontier cycle of boom and bust and a mother who slowly lost her life to Huntington’s chorea. Around the time Woody’s father died in a hotel-room fire in Oklahoma City, Woody hit the road.

When he was seventeen, in Pampa, Texas, the vortex of the Dust Bowl, his square-dance fiddler uncle Jeff taught him how to play the guitar. During the Depression, Guthrie hitchhiked and hoboed around the United States, marrying three women and siring five kids along the way while writing “This Land Is Your Land,” “Roll On, Columbia,” “Dust Bowl Refugee,” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” and more than a thousand other songs that continue to echo in the American spirit. “I hate a song that makes you think you’re not any good,” Guthrie wrote in Bound for Glory. “I hate a song that makes you think you’re born to lose . . . I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and your work. . . .I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world.”

Two days after reading Bound for Glory, recalls fellow guitarslinger and Minneapolis buddy Tony Glover, Dylan seemed to turn into Guthrie, complete with Okemah twang. He taught himself every Guthrie song he could get his hands on, at one point singing nothing but Guthrie songs for six months. Every time Bob got drunk during the fall of 1960, he tried to call Guthrie in Greystone Park Hospital in New Jersey, where Guthrie was suffering the same rare degenerative nerve disorder that killed his mother. Guthrie hadn’t been able to sing since 1952; now he could barely move or talk. In December 1960, Dylan dropped out of school and hitchhiked to New York to meet his hero.

Bob Dylan landed in Greenwich Village on a wintry January day in the middle of the folk boom, a scrawny figure in a sheepskin jacket with an unruly hair mop stuffed into a black corduroy cap, and no place to stay. At the Fat Black Pussycat, the Fifth Peg, the Café Wha?, and a half-dozen other “basket houses” clustered near the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets, young folk musicians including Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Maria Muldaur, Richie Havens, and Fred Neil eked out a living passing a wicker basket around to the clusters of beatnik-seeking tourists. Dylan talked his way in to see the manager of the Café Wha? His first night in the city, still in his traveling clothes, Dylan made his New York debut at an open-mike.

The next day, Dylan hitched to East Orange, New Jersey, to meet Woody Guthrie. Guthrie often spent the weekend with longtime fans and friends Bob and Sid Gleason, who on Sundays would host an open house that had become a gathering place for the time’s best folksingers, who stopped by to play music for Woody and for each other. Over the next few months, Dylan would meet them all, from Guthrie’s long-time sidekick Cisco Houston, who was on his last legs—nearly dead of cancer himself at forty-two—to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Josh White, and Odetta. None was more important, though, than Pete Seeger, the guiding spirit of the folk explosion, who would soon take Bob Dylan under his wing.