Description
Every year the Biographers International Organization gives the Plutarch Award to the best biography of the year, named after the father of biography : Plutarch.
The 2023 award went to Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans. Based 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 Angels.
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.
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