PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A fascinating read about a true genius and his unrelenting thirst for
beauty in art and in life.”—MIKHAIL BARYSHNIKOV Winner of the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing •
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the
PEN Jacqueline Bograd Weld AwardBased on a decade of unprecedented research the first major
biography of George Balanchine a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the
tumultuous century that shaped the man The New York Times called the Shakespeare of
dancing”—from the bestselling author of Apollo’s AngelsNew York Times Editors’ Choice •
Longlisted for the Biographers International Plutarch Award • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE
YEAR: The New York Times Book Review The New Yorker Vanity Fair NPR Oprah DailyArguably the
greatest choreographer who ever lived George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the
twentieth century—The New York Times called him the Shakespeare of dancing.” His radical
approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend. Written
with enormous style and artistry and based on more than one hundred interviews and research in
archives across Russia Europe and the Americas Mr. B carries us through Balanchine’s
tumultuous and high-pitched life story and into the making of his extraordinary
dances.Balanchine’s life intersected with some of the biggest historical events of his century.
Born in Russia under the last czar Balanchine experienced the upheavals of World War I the
Russian Revolution exile World War II and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City
Ballet he pressed ballet in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art.
None of this was easy and we see his loneliness and failures his five marriages—all to
dancers—and many loves. We follow his bouts of ill health and spiritual crises and learn of
his profound musical skills and sensibility and his immense determination to make some of the
most glorious strange and beautiful dances ever to grace the modern stage.With full access to
Balanchine’s papers and many of his dancers Jennifer Homans the dance critic for The New
Yorker and a former dancer herself has spent more than a decade researching Balanchine’s life
and times to write a vast history of the twentieth century through the lens of one of its
greatest artists: the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.
