A riveting biography of one of the late-20th-century’s most fascinating and inscrutable figures. Greenberg and Jordan have set themselves a difficult task, writing the life of an individual who did his best to interpose a façade between himself and the world at all times, but they pull it off, in part by letting their subject’s metamorphosis govern their text. They begin at the beginning, with Warhol’s childhood infatuation with Shirley Temple and follow their subject to art school and beyond, when he began experimenting with both art and life to the point where they became one and the same. Warhol’s determination to create himself and his world marks one of the central themes, as it must; his alienation from the world he effectively escapes is its mirror. Liberally incorporating quotations from interviews and reminiscences, the narrative moves back and forth from explication of Warhol’s art and methods to an almost awed (and frequently very funny) chronicling of the ever-increasing weirdness of Warhol’s life and work. By the end, the man and the myth have become one—Warhol would’ve liked that. (full-color insert of selected art, chronology, glossary, filmography, bibliography, notes, sources) (Biography. YA)
