This article: Dylan has been described as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, musically and culturally. He was included in the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century where he was called "master poet, caustic social critic and intrepid, guiding spirit of the counterculture generation". In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded him a special citation for "his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power."
President Barack Obama said of Dylan in 2012, "There is not a bigger giant in the history of American music." For 20 years, academics lobbied the Swedish Academy to give Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. He received the award in 2016, making Dylan the first musician to be awarded the Literature Prize. Horace Engdahl, a member of the Nobel Committee, described Dylan's place in literary history:
...a singer worthy of a place beside the Greek bards, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.
Rolling Stone has ranked Dylan at number one in its 2015 list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, and listed "Like A Rolling Stone" as the "Greatest Song of all Time" in their 2011 list. In 2008, it was estimated that Dylan had sold about 120 million albums worldwide.
Initially modeling his writing style on the songs of Woody Guthrie, the blues of Robert Johnson, and what he termed the "architectural forms" of Hank Williams songs, Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it "with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry". Paul Simon suggested that Dylan's early compositions virtually took over the folk genre: "[Dylan's] early songs were very rich ... with strong melodies. 'Blowin' in the Wind' has a really strong melody. He so enlarged himself through the folk background that he incorporated it for a while. He defined the genre for a while."When Dylan made... contains an answer for the question: What is the last name of the person who received an award from the Nobel Committee in 2016?, what is it ?


Dylan