Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century

Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived--The New York Times called him "the Shakespeare of dancing"--George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century. His radical approach to choreography--and life--reinvented the art of dance and made him a legend. Written with enormous style and artistry, and based on over 100 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 coincided 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, exile, World War II, and the Cold War. A co-founder of the New York City Ballet, he pressed dance in America to the forefront of modernism and made it a popular art. None of this was easy, and Homans shows us 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, and the definitive biography of the man his dancers called Mr. B.