Deborah Solomon's definitive biography of Joseph Cornell, one of America's most moving and unusual twentieth-century artists, now reissued twenty years later with updated and extensively revised text Few artists ever led a stranger life than Joseph Cornell, the self-taught American genius prized for his enigmatic shadow boxes, who stands at the intersection of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Legends about Cornell abound-the shy hermit, the devoted family caretaker, the artistic innocent-but never before has he been presented for what he was: a brilliant, relentlessly serious artist whose stature has now reached monumental proportions.