"Everywhere regarded as one of our most brilliant composers - more than nine hundred published songs, forty Broadway musicals, numerous films, every award conceivable - Richard Rodgers, the man, has nonetheless been consistently misunderstood - seen as the almost stolid opposite of what he really was.".

"Now Meryle Secrest - biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein - brings her skills to this full-scale life of Rodgers. She shows us for the first time the complexities of his nature, his emotional fault lines, and, most important, the well-springs of his art."--BOOK JACKET.