Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

by Patrick McGilligan

Overview

On the centennial of his birth, the defining wunderkind of modern entertainment gets his due in a groundbreaking new biography of his early years—from his first forays in theater and radio to the inspiration and making of Citizen Kane.

In the history of American popular culture, there is no more dramatic story—no swifter or loftier ascent to the pinnacle of success and no more tragic downfall—than that of Orson Welles. In this magisterial biography, Patrick McGilligan brings young Orson into focus as never before. He chronicles Welles’s early life growing up in Wisconsin and Illinois as the son of an alcoholic industrialist and a radical suffragist and classical musician, and the magical early years of his career, including his marriage and affairs, his influential friendships, and his artistic collaborations.

The tales of his youthful achievements were so colorful and improbable that Welles, with his air of mischief, was often thought to have made them up. Now after years of intensive research, McGilligan sorts out fact from fiction and reveals untold, fully documented anecdotes of Welles’s first exploits and triumphs, from starring as a teenager on the Gate Theatre stage in Dublin and bullfighting in Sevilla, to his time in the New York theater and his fraught partnership with John Houseman in the Mercury Theatre, to his arrival in Hollywood and the making of Citizen Kane. Filled with intriguing new insights and startling revelations—including the surprising true origin and meaning of “Rosebud”—Young Orson is a fascinating look at the creative development and influences that shaped this legendary artistic genius.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062112491
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Pages:	864
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.70(h) x 4.90(d)

About the Author

Patrick McGilligan is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He also edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle), the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Kenosha, where Orson Welles was born.

Editorial Reviews

[Young Orson] takes the directorial hero from his birth to the threshold of ‘Citizen Kane.’ I’ve only just started it and can so far confess to fascination and pleasure; the wealth of detail and the measured tempo are up to the Shakespearean complexity of Welles’s character.

New Yorker

A richly detailed, often nuanced study of Welles’ life and work. It’s a welcome addition to the burgeoning shelf of books on one of America’s most distinctive talents. . . . Although Young Orson reads easily, it is powered by an evenhanded, almost scholarly rigor.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

McGilligan’s Orson is a Welles for a new generation. . . .McGilligan’s book vibrates with uncertainty and risk, and it hums with the possibility that talented people actually can realize their dreams in the forms they choose.

BookForum

To read this book is to be taken with just how much meaningful work [Welles] packed into his youth, and awestruck by the self-assurance with which he approached his burgeoning career. . . With McGilligan’s superb biography, we have the definitive portrait of Welles in his youth.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

No other biographer has done such a superb job of investigating Orson Welles’s Midwestern origins and dazzling early success. McGilligan convincingly refutes untruths and myths that others have accepted. This is by far the best book on the most formative period of Welles’s life.

James Naremore

In many ways,Young Orson is my favorite of all the Welles biographies to date. The overall portrait of Welles’s character and background that emerges, uncharacteristically sympathetic, is both dense and persuasive - and a page-turning pleasure to read.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

An indefatigable reporter and masterful biographer, McGilligan has unearthed endless revelations that will change our view of Welles’s. This book is a constant joy to read, showing that the truth about Welles’s upbringing and youthful artistic triumphs is even more remarkable than the legend.

Joseph McBride

Must reading for anyone interested in the history of film.

Mark Levine

No one writes biographies of film legends like Patrick McGilligan. . . . It is a meticulous recreation of Welles’s life and achievement up to 1941.

Daily Beast

A prodigious and illuminating account of the extraordinary life of Orson Welles up to when he turned from theater and radio to launch his fabled movie career. McGilligan blends valuable new reporting with insights from existing sources to draw a bold portrait of the master that can fairly be called definitive.

George Stevens

10/05/2015
Orson Welles, America’s storied show-biz boy wonder, appears to the manor born in this engrossing biography. Film historian McGilligan (Nicholas Ray) follows Welles from his Illinois boarding-school productions (which even then drew press interest) to his professional debut at age 16 in Dublin, playing roles twice his age. New York directing coups followed, including his all-black Macbeth and Fascist-themed Julius Caesar. His radio play of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds induced panic. His movie Citizen Kane, hailed by many critics as the greatest film ever, was made when he was just 25. This is a book about families, with rich profiles of Welles’s affluent, indulgent parents; a series of father figures who mentored him, promoted him, and lent him money; and his close-knit acting ensemble at the Mercury Theater, where he played the paternal, tyrannical head of the household. It’s also a fine evocation of Welles’s innate charisma, concocted from a grand physical presence, godlike voice, Falstaffian magnetism, and uncanny precocious insight into character and dramatic effect. Exhaustively researched but well-paced and stuffed with beguiling detail, this is a vivid, sympathetic portrait of Welles’s youthful promise and achievement, before the misfires and compromises of his later years. B&w photos. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/15/2015
As 2015 marks the centenary of the birth of Orson Welles, a number of recent books have covered this legendary filmmaker. The latest is a massive tome devoted to perhaps the least chronicled aspect of his career: his rise. Welles, post-Citizen Kane, has been studied by countless scholars, but McGilligan, biographer of Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, provides a much-needed view of his subject's early days in school, theater, and radio. The author conducted extensive research to extract the truth of Welles's origins from the myths and legends spun by the man himself. Actor and writer Simon Callow tackled this same period in 1996's Road to Xanadu, the first in his four-part biography of Welles. Yet as excellent as that work remains, McGilligan's possesses a more inviting style, imparting just as much insight as Callow's book but without feeling as academic. VERDICT Welles's native brilliance and his ascent from producing plays as a boy at the Todd School to his conquest of New York theater and radio as an adult has seldom been documented with more clarity. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]—Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Library Journal

2015-09-22
A boy wonder's life—overlong but also filling.Few directors in film history have generated more biographies than Orson Welles (1915-1985), and anyone tackling the job anew better have a fresh angle or something new to report. Veteran film scribe McGilligan (Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, 2011, etc.) meets this challenge by focusing exclusively on Welles' early years, but his success is mixed. When he's not leaning heavily on the work of his many predecessors—mainly Barbara Leaming, as well as Peter Bogdanovich, Simon Callow, and Frank Brady—as well as the bitter memoirs of Welles' former friend John Houseman, he's expanding heavily on stories they either succinctly boiled down or scraps they left behind, from Welles' youthful poetry to day-by-day accounts of his international trips to microscopic rehashings of minor scuffles. While the book is needlessly long, McGilligan does illuminate the full scope of a truly charmed youth, and he reminds us that while it may be unfair to say that Welles peaked early, there were definitely a lot of peaks, even before he triumphed as the 25-year-old whiz behind Citizen Kane. The pampered son of an alcoholic businessman and a progressive socialite, he was raised to be a genius, and he didn't disappoint. He was only 20 when he staged a revolutionary all-black Macbeth for the Federal Theater ("The great success of my life," he called it), followed up by a modern-dress Julius Caesar and more theater successes, making the cover of Time even before he cooked up the idea of a live-radio Martian landing. Then it was on to Kane, which the author pieces together in generous detail, with specific attention to the much-debated relationship between Welles and co-scenarist Herman Mankiewicz. McGilligan works overtime trying to justify such a massive book about only a part of Welles' life, but it's also buoyed by a dependably powerful subject at the center.

Kirkus Reviews