Robert Allen Zimmerman (24 May 1941-), later known as Bob Dylan, was an American singer-songwriter who was known for his involvement in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941 to a Jewish family, and he dropped out college in 1960, headed to New York City a year later, and became a musician. Taking his stage name from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, he performed at clubs in Greenwich Village; in 1963, he released his iconic song "Blowin' in the Wind", and his music often tackled pressing issues such as the Civil Rights movement, nuclear disarmament, the counterculture movement, the Vietnam War, and other controversial topics. Dylan established himself as a leader of the counterculture movement, and he introduced The Beatles to marijuana and took part in some of the movement's excesses. By the early 1970s, his vocal output was varied and unpredictable, and he explored country and folk music. In the late 1970s, he became a born-again Christian, releasing gospel music, but he later returned to Judaism in the . He returned to rock in the early 1980s, and he published eight books of drawings and paintings after 1994. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 for his contributions to music.