The first comprehensive biography of America's most influential and controversial art critic, a man who defined abstract expressionism and brought it to the world stage. Clement Greenberg embodied many of the themes and tensions of American intellectual life. In a fascinating narrative that draws on untapped archives and scores of interviews, Florence Rubenfeld traces Greenberg's sharp ascent into the highest realms of New York's intellectual and art worlds. In his late twenties, Greenberg started to write for the Partisan Review despite having no formal training in art history, and he rocketed to fame when his seminal essay on aesthetics, "Avant-garde and Kitsch", was published in 1939. A career as an art critic had begun. Greenberg championed a new clique of abstract expressionists and almost single-handedly made the careers of Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and Mark Rothko, as well as Helen Frankenthaler, with whom he had a torrid love affair. He prophesied that New York and not Paris would be the new capital of art in the 20th century. Without Clement Greenberg, American art -- and how we think of American art -- would be quite different. Moving from Greenberg's humble origins in the Bronx to his role at the pinnacle of the New York art world, this book masterfully traces his charge through American culture and history.