A Freewheelin Time, Suze Rotolo
A Freewheelin Time, Suze Rotolo
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

A Freewheelin' Time
A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties

Author: Suze Rotolo

Narrator: Christina Delaine

Unabridged: 9 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/14/2020


Synopsis

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.

About Suze Rotolo

Suze Rotolo is an artist who lives in New York City with her family.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave on January 12, 2025

1/10/25: The struggle in Dylan's early romantic life in New York was between Joan Baez and Suze Rotolo, whose name was changed to Sylvie Russo in Timothee Chalamet's A Complete Unknown, which I loved. Dylan requested that the filmmakers change her name in the film as Rotolo had never wanted to be as......more

Goodreads review by Lynx on February 10, 2018

As a “red diaper baby” with two Communist parents, political activism was built into Suze’s DNA. As a young teenager she began hanging out in Greenwich Village with other like-minded friends and was soon a fixture at clubs such as Gerdes Folk City, The Gaslight, Kettle of Fish and The Bitter End. Pl......more

Goodreads review by Adrienne on February 04, 2009

I have mixed feelings about this book but overall I liked it. On the one hand, the writing isn’t stellar and Rotolo bounces all over the place chronologically and thematically. I found myself often having to go back and figure out where we were in the time line (which isn’t a very accurate term beca......more

Goodreads review by Ben on April 09, 2008

So, thanks to H and L, I managed to get a reviewer's copy of Suze Rotolo's new memoir "A Freewheelin' Time" and devoured it over the weekend. As Todd Haynes says on the back, this is a welcome perspective - finally, the voice of a woman at the epicenter of the 60's folk scene, speaking strongly and......more

Goodreads review by KOMET on February 22, 2024

Suze Rotolo has written a book based in part on her relationship with Bob Dylan, as well as one that recaptures the essence of a decade (the 1960s) that set in train both progressive-revolutionary and reactionary forces that transformed the world in ways that affect it to this day. Though I was born......more