At 95, Clint Eastwood is one of the last of his generation of Hollywood stars. The Oscar-winning, acclaimed actor and director has been a major part of Americana for over six decades and counting.
And now a brand new biography by film critic and author Shawn Levy, who has also penned ones on Paul Newman and Robert De Niro, is set to be published next week.
Clint: The Man and the Movies is out from July 1, including on Kindle, and has received high praise.
The LA Times is calling it the “must read book for summer” and Sir Christopher Frayling, author of Sergio Leone added, “This is the biography of Clint Eastwood we’ve been waiting for.”
The book’s official synopsis reads: “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.”