Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1928, Andy Warhol was for some twenty-five years one of the most celebrated figures in New York society, and probably second only to Picasso as the world's best-known contemporary artist. His Pop Art painting o fa Campbell's Soup can and his silkscreen images of Marilyn Monroe are internationally recognized icons of modern art. The series of Factories where his silkscreens were produced became the haunt of misfits, drop-outs, and addicts but also of the most chic and wealthy New York society. In 1968 he narrowly escaped death when he was shot by Valerie Solanis, a disappointed actress and writer, an act that seemed to put the American Seal of Approval on the fame he had been seeking since adolescence. In Loner at the Ball, based on massive research and scores of interviews with Warhol's friends and associates, bestselling biographer Fred Lawrence Guiles gives us a complete view of a remarkable twentieth century life and an informed assessment of what Warhol's work represents in the history of art. He explores the paradoxical nature of a man who cultivated celebrity but whom television producers learned to avoid because he had so little to say; a man surrounded by a world of drugs and sex who was himself largely celibate, did not smoke or take drugs, and rarely drank; perhaps above all a man who spent most of his waking hours in the heart of a crowd but who felt that he himself was in a vacuum, a solitary observer, a loner at the ball.