**A New York Times Editors Choice** "The most substantive biography of the artist to date...propulsive, positive and persuasive."&;Holland Cotter, New York Times Book Review **PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Finalist** **A Marfield Prize Finalist**Cy Twombly was a man obsessed with myth and history&;including his own. Shuttling between stunning homes in Italy and the United States where he perfected his room-size canvases, he managed his public image carefully and rarely gave interviews. Upon first seeing Twombly&;s remarkable paintings, writer Joshua Rivkin became obsessed himself with the mysterious artist, and began chasing every lead, big or small&;anything that might illuminate those works, or who Twombly really was. Now, after unprecedented archival research and years of interviews, Rivkin has reconstructed Twombly&;s life, from his time at the legendary Black Mountain College to his canonization in a 1994 MoMA retrospective; from his heady explorations of Rome in the 1950s with Robert Rauschenberg to the ongoing efforts to shape his legacy after his death.Including previously unpublished photographs, Chalk presents a more personal and searching type of biography than we&;ve ever encountered, and brings to life a more complex Twombly than we&;ve ever known.