Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century

Jennifer Homans

Mr. B won the Plutarch Award for Best Biography and the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Baillie Gifford Prize. Based on a decade of unprecedented research, this is the first major biography of George Balanchine, a broad-canvas portrait set against the backdrop of the tumultuous century that shaped the man. Arguably the greatest choreographer who ever lived, George Balanchine was one of the cultural titans of the twentieth century. 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 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.