Alvin Ailey

Alvin Ailey's life has become almost mythical, and his dance work Revelations is often cited as the most widely viewed piece in dance history. Jennifer Dunning traces how a boy raised in grinding poverty by a mother who worked herself to exhaustion, and who had little time left for him, grew into one of the most important figures in American dance.

From his teenage years Ailey knew he was gay. He found a more welcoming atmosphere in the theater than he had known at home, though he sometimes concealed who he was, as if he had never left his conservative family and Southern church. A gifted athlete as a young man, he later worked in a field that prizes a flawless body, and he damaged his own health with alcohol and then drugs. Even with loyal friends around him, he often felt isolated. Despite these obstacles, he gathered the fragments of his life into a body of art and built a dance company that still performs around the globe.

Dunning shows how Ailey drew on his earliest experiences and transformed them on stage. Among the sources she describes are the pulsing rhythms that spilled from the Dew Drop Inn on hot Saturday nights and the image of men churning the water to drive away snakes during his baptism.

The book is illustrated with striking photographs and draws on hundreds of interviews with people who knew him, among them Mikhail Baryshnikov, Judith Jamison, Lena Horne, Katherine Dunham, Sidney Poitier and Dustin Hoffman. It presents Ailey as an artist who wove his own life and the culture around him into his choreography, and through it into the broader story of America.