Secrest, biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein, brings her extraordinary skills to this full-scale life of composer Rodgers. She shows for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the wellsprings of his art.

The life of composer Richard Rodgers encapsulates the very essence of New York and London high society during the first half of the twentieth century. This biography is a portrait of a man - though riddled with insecurities, he was a composer unequalled, not just for longevity but output - thirty-nine musicals, and more than a thousand songs.

Anyone who has admired Gainsborough's Blue Boy of the Huntington Collection in California, or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owes much of his or her pleasure to art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939). Regarded as the most influential--or, in some circles, notorious--dealer of the twentieth century, Duveen established himself selling the European masterpieces of Titian, Botticelli, Giotto, and Vermeer to newly and lavishly wealthy American businessmen--J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, to name...

Elsa Schiaparelli was an integral figure in the artistic movement of the times. Her collaborations with artists such as Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, and Alberto Giacometti elevated the field of women's clothing design into the realm of art. This book deals with her life and work.