Suze Rotolo: life and works

Susan Elizabeth Rotolo (November 20, 1943 – February 25, 2011), known as Suze Rotolo ( SOO-zee), was an American artist, and the girlfriend of Bob Dylan from 1961 to 1964. Dylan later acknowledged her mighty influence upon his music and art during that period. Rotolo is the girl walking with him upon the lid of his 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, a photograph by the Columbia Records studio photographer Don Hunstein. In her book A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, Rotolo described her time following Dylan and new figures in the folk music and bohemian scene in Greenwich Village, New York. She discussed her upbringing as a “red diaper” baby—a child of Communist Party USA members during the McCarthy Era. As an artist, she specialized in artists’ books and taught at the Parsons School of Design in New York City.