By Edward Jablonski

This still unrivaled biography portrays with precision and insight the tragically brief life—from the Brooklyn tenements to Broadway, Hollywood, and Carnegie Hall—of George Gershwin (1898–1937), a man whose music (Lady Be Good, Of Thee I Sing, Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, An American in Paris, Porgy and Bess) and career—like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s—embodied the glamorous success and lost possibilities of the Jazz Age.