The girl from the cover of Bob Dylan’s album Freewheelin’ breaks a forty-five–year silence to recount her four-year relationship with Dylan and his growing fame.
Suze Rotolo chronicles her coming of age in Greenwich Village during the 1960s and the early days of the folk music explosion, when Bob Dylan was finding his voice and she was his muse.
A shy girl from Queens, Suze was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists, growing up at the dawn of the Cold War. It was the age of McCarthy, and Suze was an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. She found solace in poetry, art, and music—and in Greenwich Village, where she encountered like-minded and politically active friends. One hot July day in 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, then a rising musician, at a concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were both vibrant, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.
A Freewheelin’ Time is a hopeful, intimate memoir of a vital movement at its most creative. It captures the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future in a time when everything seemed possible.
Praise for A Freewheelin’ Time
“A delightful surprise. . . . [Rotolo] gracefully captures Greenwich Village as an enchanted lost world.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A portrait-of-an-era . . . through [Rotolo’s] eyes, we see Dylan as a unique artist on his way to greatness.” —People
“Artist Suze Rotolo pays rollicking homage to a revolutionary age.” —Vogue
“Exhilarating. . . . A moving account.” —New York Times
“A perceptive, entertaining, and often touching book about a remarkable era in recent American cultural history, about a way of living, of making art, that couldn’t have happened at any other time or in any other place.” —Stephanie Zacharek, Salon
