Love is everything, no matter what you think about it, you can never live without it!
A collection of personal letters written by a very young Bob Dylan to his high school sweetheart fetched $670,000 at auction.
The sale included 42 handwritten letters from Dylan to his girlfriend at the time, Barbara Ann Hewitt, who kept them for over 60 years. Inside them were numerous pages detailing his dreams as a boy and several poetic fragments.
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In one of the letters, which gives us an interesting insight into the artist's life, the ambitious 17-year-old talks to Hewitt about his desire to change his name (as at the time he was still known as Robert Zimmerman) and to one day be able to sell millions of records. That boy, who is now 81, has since become world-famous, selling over 125 million records and being awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
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It was the daughter of Barbara Ann Hewitt, who died in 2020, who found the letters. One of them hints that the love story is coming to an end and Bob Dylan asks to have some photos back. Barbara's daughter has revealed that Dylan called her mother back in the '60s asking her to join him in California, but she didn't accept. And apparently, the singer-songwriter did not easily forget his young love: the woman's red hair returns in some famous songs such as Tangled up in Blue from 1975, in which Bob sings: "If her hair was still red", perhaps referring to his ex-girlfriend.
See also: Summer in the Sixties
The letters were purchased by the Livraria Lello of Porto, which calls itself A Livraria Mais Bonita do Mundo, "the most beautiful bookshop in the world". According to RR Auction, the Boston auction house specialising in one-of-a-kind memorabilia that organised the sale, the bookstore intends to keep the archive of 42 letters and make it available to Dylan fans and scholars.
Other Dylan items also went up for auction, including 24 untitled poems written by the singer-songwriter while in college (sold for nearly $250,000), and an early signed photograph of Dylan, which sold for more than $24,000.
