Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey relates the powerful story of one man's painful search for identity despite a lifetime of remarkable achievement. For the first time, Ailey speaks about the events and individuals who made him what he was, especially the profound negative impact of his fatherless childhood.

Among his moving recollections: the music and "blood memories" of rural Texas and Los Angeles in the Depression-era thirties; the colorful true stories that became the narratives for his ballets; an early brush with dramatic theater, a field he debated choosing over dance; his outspoken words about the politics and racism in the dance world; and his insights into such luminaries of that world as George Balanchine and Judith Jamison.

Also for the first time, Ailey discusses his homosexuality and reveals why the devastating emotional breakdown that made headlines in 1980 was the culmination of "a ten-month-long self-destructive fling" that nearly cost him his sanity.