Mr. B

The New York Times called him the Shakespeare of dancing. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century. His radical approach to choreography reinvented the art of dance and his richly imaginative ballets made him a legend. Yet, Balanchine's life was as dramatic as his art, coinciding with some of the biggest historical events of his time. Born in Russia under the last Czar, Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, exile, and the Cold War. He co-founded the New York City Ballet and revolutionized dance in America, pressing it to the forefront of modernism and making it serious and popular art. A man of many muses, Balanchine was married five times and consumed by other loves in between. Both the passions that animated him and the difficulties of his life--personal losses, bouts of ill health, and dark moods of despair--resonate in his more than 100 ballets, which speak of love, loss, mortality, and the transformative power of art. Nearly forty years after his death the full scale of Balanchine's achievement remains unexplored. Jennifer Homans, who studied with Balanchine and has had unprecedented access to his papers and many of those who knew him, has researched every facet of Balanchine's life and times. As much a biography as a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its greatest artists, Mr. B is the definitive biography by ballet's definitive writer--