Bob Dylan has been accused of plagiarism after accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature. The lecture drew on literary themes, but portions of it seemed to take from SparkNotes, an online equivalent to cliff notes.
Andrea Pitzer on Slate was the first to come out with this story, as Pitzer uncovered the similarities between the SparkNotes entry on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Pitzer dove into the story after writer Ben Greenman noted that Dylan might have made up a quote from Moby-Dick.
The quote in question is “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness.”
Pitzer began digging and soon, her research turned up many parallels between Dylan’s speech and the SparkNotes from the book. It seemed many of the phrases from the notes were lifted for his speech, a number of which don’t appear in the actual book.
Dylan’s management nor his label reps were available for comment.