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.

"A sensitive, specific, gracefully worded and remarkably clearheaded book that is both an engrossing biography of a craggy, idiosyncratic New England 'character' and a detailed examination of the work he left behind". -- Washington Post Book World, Editors' Choice

"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