Charles Ives

A Life with Music

Jan Swafford author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:WW Norton & Co

Published:4th Mar '98

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Charles Ives cover

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.

"First-rate. . . . Thoughtful, witty, instructive, this is one of the best biographies in recent memory, as warm and strangely inspiring as the man and the music it describes." -- Newsweek
"Starred Review. A superb writer. . . . [Swafford has] brought the old curmudgeon . . . to vivid life, at once a comic and a tragic figure and in terms of his significance in American artistic life, on the level of Twain or Whitman." -- Publishers Weekly

  • Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Award 1996

ISBN: 9780393317190

Dimensions: 234mm x 155mm x 36mm

Weight: 792g

544 pages