More people watched Liberace's fifties television show than followed I Love Lucy or Dragnet. Even a decade after his death, the attendance records of his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden, and Radio City Music Hall remain unmatched. Perhaps the most popular entertainer of the twentieth century, this very public figure nonetheless guarded numerous secrets. Darden Asbury Pyron, author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling biography of Margaret Mitchell, Southern Daughter, leads us through both the public triumphs and private struggles of the man known to generations as "Mr. Showmanship."

Liberace's career follows a rags-to-riches American paradigm. Born to poor Polish-Italian immigrant parents in the Midwest, he was a child prodigy who, by the age of twenty, had performed with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Soon after, he abandoned the concert stage for the lucrative and glittery world of nightclubs and television, Hollywood and Las Vegas. While wildly successful and good-natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservatism existed side-by-side with a lifestyle of secret homosexuality. Just so, his swishy persona belied an inner life of aggression and ambition--both professional and sexual. Liberace: An American Boy relates this private man to the public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the United States in the twentieth century.

Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ll, of modern America, with its endless shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this fascinating biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates our image of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lame and whose excesses helped destroy him.

$27.50 at The University Of Chicago Press

Presented with permission!
How nice!!