"Clement Greenberg (1909-94) dominated the American art scene, and is still considered the most influential American art critic of the twentieth century. He almost single-handedly established Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists at the center of art in the West, and set the tone for art criticism for half a century to come. This biography, based on unpublished and previously unavailable documents, interviews, and archives, presents a story of imagination and grandiosity, of vision and excess." "Alice Goldfarb Marquis presents Greenberg's complex relations with numerous friends, lovers, and rivals, including Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Harold Rosenberg. She also recreates the heady art scene in America from the 1940s through the 1980s, detailing how a generation of critics, with Greenberg at the helm, used personal conviction and innate notions of taste to define the course of modern art."--BOOK JACKET