Suze Rotolo | Bob Dylan's ex-lover, 67

Suze Rotolo, 67, Bob Dylan's girlfriend in the early 1960s, who appeared walking arm-in-arm with him on the iconic cover of his album

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

, died of lung cancer last Friday at home in New York's Greenwich Village.

Ms. Rotolo was a 17-year-old art- and poetry-loving civil rights activist from Queens when she met the 20-year-old folksinger from Minnesota at an all-day folk concert at Riverside Church in Manhattan in the summer of 1961.

"Right from the start, I couldn't take my eyes off her," Dylan wrote in Chronicles: Volume One, his 2004 memoir. "She was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen."

Ms. Rotolo later wrote that Dylan "made me think of Harpo Marx, impish and approachable, but there was something about him that broadcast an intensity that was not to be taken lightly."

So began a four-year relationship that was immortalized on a wintry day in 1963 when photographer Don Hunstein captured the young couple walking down a snowy Greenwich Village street, Dylan's hands thrust in his pockets and Ms. Rotolo's hands wrapped snugly around his arm.

"It was freezing out," she recalled in a 2008 interview with the New York Times. "He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage."

The photo became the cover of Dylan's breakthrough second album, which includes the songs "Blowin' in the Wind," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and "Masters of War."

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan also inspired the title for Ms. Rotolo's 2008 memoir, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties, which reviewers praised for capturing the era's Bohemian atmosphere.

In 1967, Ms. Rotolo married Italian-born Enzo Bartoccioli, a film editor. They had a son, Luca.

- Los Angeles Times