"This distinguished book is the first full-length biography of the most famous American painter of his generation - the first to gain an international reputation for himself and for what has variously been called Action painting, Abstract Expressionism, or simply American-type painting. With compassion and understanding, B.H. Friedman writes of a great artist whose life has many of the qualities of myth - a complex, tortured man troubled by his relationship to his family and by a history of alcoholism going back to his middle teens; a man who worked hard to achieve his famous and controversial 'drip technique' through years of the bitterest poverty; and who, from 1943 until his tragic death in 1956 at fort-four, 'danced,' as B.H. Friedman says, 'many of the most graceful and powerful paintings ever made in America or anywhere else.'" -- from interior flap. Includes bibliography and index. Printed in black-and-white.