Orson Welles (1915-1985) revolutionized the art of filmmaking with his first feature, Citizen Kane, made when he was only 25. This landmark study challenges the conventional wisdom that regards Welles's subsequent career as a long decline from that early peak, demonstrating that Welles continued to create audacious, profoundly moving, and richly varied films throughout his tumultuous life.

Tracing Welles's development from his playful beginnings as an amateur filmmaker in the early 1930s to his masterly artistic summation in such late works as Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, and F for Fake, the book brilliantly synthesizes Welles's wide-ranging body of film work into a thematic whole while providing in-depth analyses of the films he directed.

Joseph McBride's passion for Welles's work and his groundbreaking scholarship made the first edition of Orson Welles a landmark study and a major influence on subsequent Welles critics and biographers.

Out of print for almost two decades, Orson Welles has now been revised and expanded, with new sections on important films and restored versions that have come to light since the book's original publication in 1972, along with an introductory essay and an extended portrait of Welles at work on the still-unreleased Hollywood satire The Other Side of the Wind (in which the author played an important role).