[3] Defying expectations,[4] Dylan wrote three chapters about the year between his arrival in New York City in 1961 and recording his first album, focusing on a brief period of relative obscurity, while virtually ignoring the mid-1960s when his fame was at its height.

He also devoted chapters to two lesser-known albums, New Morning (1970) and Oh Mercy (1989), which contained insights into his collaborations with poet Archibald MacLeish and producer Daniel Lanois.

In the New Morning chapter, Dylan expresses distaste for the "spokesman of a generation" label bestowed upon him, and evinces disgust with his more fanatical followers.

Chronicles received many positive reviews, with The Telegraph remarking that the book had "garnered unanimous critical acclaim in the press".

[11] A 2020 Rolling Stone list of the "50 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time" placed Chronicles first, noting that "[I]t's safe to say that nobody expected [Dylan's] autobiography to be this intense.

[12] Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin has shown skepticism concerning the factualness of the book: "Jesus Christ, as far as I can tell almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction.

He discussed his strategy for writing it in a Time magazine interview in 2001: "I'll take some of the stuff that people think is true and I'll build a story around that".

[15] Some Dylan fans, like New Mexico disc jockey Scott Warmuth and Catholic University scholar Edward Cook, have deeply researched the unique language used throughout Chronicles: Volume One, and discovered that the book appropriates phrases, anecdotes, and descriptions from numerous authors.

[16] Dylan incorporated unique phrases from books by Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Mezz Mezzrow, Marcel Proust, Henry Rollins and Mark Twain into his narrative.

[2] A number of these instances of intertextual appropriation were detailed in David Kinney's book about hard-core fans of the artist, titled The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob, as well as The Daily Beast.

This passage is dramatized in the Marcus Carl Franklin-starring "Woody Guthrie" section of the film I'm Not There, Todd Haynes' unconventional 2007 biopic of Dylan.

[22] Columbia Records released a Chronicles promotional CD sampler featuring 6 songs that corresponded to the three main time periods covered in the book: a previously unreleased live 1962 version of "The Cuckoo", the New Morning tracks "New Morning" and "Father of Night", the Oh Mercy tracks "Political World" and "Man in the Long Black Coat" and a previously unreleased demo version of the song "Dignity" from 1989.