"Sensitive, specific, gracefully worded and remarkably clearheaded" ("Washington Post Book World"), this illuminating portrait of composer Charles Ives reveals a man whose innovative works profoundly influenced the course of twentieth-century American classical music. A "New York Times" Notable Book. Photos.
Jan Swafford's colorful biography first unfolds in Ives's Connecticut hometown of Danbury, then follows Ives to Yale and on to his years in New York, where he began his double career as composer and insurance executive. The Charles Ives that emerges from Swafford's story is a precocious, well-trained musician, a brilliant if mercurial thinker about art and life, and an experimenter in the spirit of Edison and the Wright brothers.