Brusque, inventive, an eccentric loner who created some of the greatest music of our time while getting rich as a New York insurance broker, Charles Ives was an authentic American original. In this major biographical study, the author explores the unlikely drama of the composer's life, from his boyhood in a Connecticut village to his later years when, ignored or derided by the musical community, he shut himself up in angry silence. Then, with a high order of scholarship and crisply edged authority, the author goes on to point out the intelligence and continuity of Ives's major works - the songs, the Concord sonata, the magnificent New England Holidays (which include his famous Fourth of July), and the rest - and to trace their roots in nineteenth-century popular music, in jazz, in the homely transcendentalism of Thoreau and Hawthorne's dark Puritan dreams. Writing with a musician's understanding and sympathy, the author makes plain both the frustrations of Ives's creative life and the inevitability of his ultimate recognition, long after his death, as America's most important composer. In its rich musical insights, in its portrayal of a complex and fascinating artist, this book is a striking contribution to American cultural history.