Offering a comprehensive overview of Orson Welles' life and career, this book highlights the filmmaker's career, emphasizing his astonishing precocity and extraordinary talent that resulted in great success as well as puzzling failure. At the core of the book are sustained studies of Welles' masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and critically incisive accounts of his other major films, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, Othello, Macbeth, and Chimes at Midnight.