Louis Armstrong is widely known as the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth centruy. A phenomenally gifted and imaginative artist, he also wrote the finest of all jazz autobiographies--without a collaborator--and created collages that have been compared to the art of Romare Bearden. The ranks of his admirers included Jean Renoir and Le Corbusier ("He is mathematics, equilibrium on a tightrope. He is Shakespearean!"). Virgil Thomson called him "a master of musical art." Stuart Davis, whose abstract paintings were full of jazz-inspired imagery, cited him as a "Model of greatness." Wall Street Journal arts columnist Terry Teachout, author of previous biographies of George Balanchine and H.L. Mencken, has drawn on a cache of sources previously unavailable, including hundreds of reels of recordings of backstage and after-hour conversations that Armstrong made throughout his career, newly uncovered material about Armstrong's early life, and Armstrong's own writings, to craft a sweeping new narrative biography of this towering figure. This is going to be the last word on Armstrong in our lifetime--it's a portrait of the man, his world, and his music that will stand alongside Gary Giddins' Bing Crosby and Peter Guralnick's works on Elvis Presley as a classic biography of a major American musician.