This book locates the man and the artist in the continuum of his times, recreating the social and cultural milieu of New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Pollock's early years are chronicled, from his birth in the Wild West town of Cody, Wyoming, in 1912, through his prophetically troubled school years, marked by repeated expulsions, to his arrival in New York and periods of rewarding study with Thomas Hart Benton, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Stanley William Hayter. With extensive knowledge of Pollock's habits (much of it gained through interviews), of his reading, his conversation, the exhibitions he visited, the author retraces many of the far-flung sources of Pollock's work - African sculpture; North American totems; the Mexican gods of Siqueiros, Orozco, and Tamayo; arcane texts favored by the Surrealists; Egyptian necrology. A wealth of comparative photographs, illustrating paintings by artists Pollock admired, further explains his work