A Freewheelin’ Time is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand,
eyewitness, participant-observer account of the immensely
creative and
fertile years of the 1960s, just before the circus was in
full swing
and Bob Dylan became the anointed ringmaster. It chronicles the
back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the
folk music
explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in
the ring
with him.
A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the
daughter
of Italian working-class Communists. Growing up at the start
of the
Cold War and during McCarthyism, she inevitably became an
outsider in
her neighborhood and at school. Her childhood was turbulent,
but Suze
found solace in poetry, art, and music. In Washington Square
Park, in
Greenwich Village, she encountered like-minded friends who
were also
politically active. Then one hot day in July 1961, Suze met
Bob Dylan,
a rising young musician, at a folk concert at Riverside
Church. She was
seventeen, he was twenty; they were young, curious, and
inseparable.
During the years they were together, Dylan was transformed
from an
obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a
generation.
Suze
Rotolo’s story is rich in character and setting, filled with
vivid
memories of those tumultuous years of dramatic change and
poignantly
rising expectations when art, culture, and politics all
seemed to be
conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and
more
equitable life. She writes of her involvement with the civil
rights
movement and describes the sometimes frustrating experience
of being a
woman in a male-dominated culture, before women’s liberation
changed
the rules for the better. And she tells the wonderfully
romantic story
of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its
eventual
collapse under the pressures of growing fame.
A
Freewheelin’ Time
is a vibrant, moving memoir of a hopeful time and place and
of a vital
subculture at its most creative. It communicates the
excitement of
youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a
brighter
future.
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