American artist Cleve Gray has produced a unique body of work over the past half century. The extent and character of his production are revealed in Nicholas Fox Weber's lucid study of the artist's life and accomplishments. Gray's interest in art began in early childhood and was stimulated greatly at Princeton University, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1940.

Cleve Gray's career and artistic development paralleled the rise of the Abstract Expressionists and the Color Field painters and mirrored some of their concerns, but his journey always remained a personal, distinctive, and independent effort that never catered to fashion.

In 1972, Gray was offered a commission that resulted in what is considered his most dazzling work, a huge multi-paneled mural for the enormous central gallery in the Philip Johnson-designed Neuberger Museum on the campus of the State University of New York at Purchase. Gray's Threnody, a brooding, passionate response to the horrors of the Vietnam War, was characterized by Emily Genauer in the New York Post as "the most moving and beautiful mural project in the country.".

Cleve Gray has also been a diligent and accomplished writer for many years. He has been a contributing editor for Art in America magazine, an essayist and editor of three volumes on the work of the artists David Smith, John Marin, and Hans Richter, and the translator of Marcel Duchamp's A l'Infinitif.