Clint: The Man and the Movies―A Comprehensive Biography of Hollywood's Most Iconic Actor-Director

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year, New York Times "Editors Choice," and Los Angeles Times "Must Read Book"

"This is the biography of Clint Eastwood we've been waiting for." — Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Sergio Leone

From the acclaimed film critic and New York Times bestselling biographer of Paul Newman, a revelatory portrait of Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, the most prolific and versatile actor-director in movie history and an imposing icon of American culture for six decades.

"This fine-grained and deeply researched unfolding of Eastwood’s life and career . . . reveal[s] fascinating truths about Eastwood’s art, and about cinema itself.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker

C-L-I-N-T. That single short, sharp syllable has stood as an emblem of American manhood and morality and sheer bloody-minded will, on-screen and off-screen, for more than sixty years. Whether he’s facing down bad guys on a Western street (Old West or new, no matter), staring through the lens of a camera, or accepting one of his movies' thirteen Oscars (including two for Best Picture), he is as blunt, curt, and solid as his name, a star of the old-school stripe and one of the most accomplished directors of his time, a man of rock and iron and brute force: Clint.

To read the story of Clint Eastwood is to understand nearly a century of American culture. No Hollywood figure has so completely and complexly stood inside the changing climates of post–World War II America. At age ninety-five, he has lived a tumultuous century and embodied much of his time and many of its contradictions.

We picture Clint squinting through cigarillo smoke in A Fistful of Dol­lars or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ; imposing rough justice at the point of a .44 Magnum in Dirty Harry ; sowing vengeance in The Outlaw Josey Wales or Pale Rider or Unforgiven ; grudgingly training a woman boxer in Million Dollar Baby ; and standing up for his neighbors despite his racism in Gran Torino . Or we feel him present, powerfully, behind the camera, creating complex tales of violence, morality, and humanity, such as Mystic River , Letters from Iwo Jima , and American Sniper . But his roles and his films, however well cast and convincing, are two-dimensional in comparison to his whole life.

As Shawn Levy reveals in this masterful biography—the most com­plete portrait yet of Eastwood—the reality is richer, knottier, and more absorbing. Clint: The Man and the Movies is a saga of cunning, determi­nation, and conquest, a story about a man ascending to the Hollywood pantheon while keeping one foot firmly planted outside its door.