BOSTON – Letters that Nobel poet Bob Dylan wrote to a Hibbing, Minnesota, sweetheart,  in the late 1950s sold at an auction for $760,000. The winning bid was from the classy bookshop Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal. The shop said it will archive the letters  for Dylan fans and scholars to study. In all, 42 handwritten letters total 150 pages. The RR auction house in Boston which handled the sale, called the letters touching and prescient. Auctioned separately:

> 24 “Poems Without Titles” written when the singer-songwriter attended the University of Minnesota, $250,000.

> The earliest known signed photographs of Dylan, $24,000.

What he wrote her

Dylan wrote the letters to Barbara Ann Hewitt between 1957 and 1959.  He expressed affection for Hewitt. He invited her to a Buddy Holly concert. He included a few lines of poetry. There was teen-talk about cars, clothes and music. Dylan, whose birth name was Bob Zimmerman, wrote about possibly changing his name. He said hoped someday to sell a million records. Dylan, now 81, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016. He has sold 125 million records.

The seller

Hewitt’s daughter found the letters after her mother died in 2020. The original envelopes were addressed in Dylan’s handwriting.  They were sent to the subject of his teen-age affecetion in the Twin Cities suburb of New Brighton, where the family had just moved.

Dylan. When he was Bob Zimmerman in Hibbing and an aspiring musician in love. He was writing poetry even then.