Clint: The Man and the Movies

From the acclaimed film critic and New York Times bestselling biographer of Paul Newman, the definitive biography of Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, the most prolific and versatile actor-director in the history of the medium, and an indelible fixture of American culture.

C-L-I-N-T. In that short, sharp syllable, there is an emblem of American manhood and morality and sheer bloody-minded will, for better and worse, on screen and off, for more than sixty years. Whether he's holding a pistol, an orangutan, or a boxing glove; whether he's facing down bad guys on a western street (Old West or new, no matter); staring through the lens of a camera; or accepting one of his thirteen Oscars (including two for Best Picture); he is as blunt, curt, and solid as his name, a star of the old school stripe and one of the most prolific and accomplished directors of his time, a man of rock and iron and brute force: Clint. 

To tell the story of Clint Eastwood is to tell the story of nearly a century of American culture. No Hollywood figure so completely and complexly represents the cultural and political climates of contemporary America. At age ninety-four, he has lived a tumultuous century and embodied much of his time and many of its contradictions. 

We picture him most immediately as he has appeared to us on screen: 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 moral vengeance in The Outlaw Josey Wales or Pale Rider; abandoning farming for murder-for-hire in Unforgiven; grudgingly training a woman boxer in Million Dollar Baby; standing up for his neighbors despite his racism toward them in Gran Torino. But those are roles, however well-cast and convincing, and they are two-dimensional in comparison to the whole life. The reality of Clint Eastwood is far more rich, knotty, and absorbing—a saga of cunning, determination, and conquest, a great American story about a man ascending to the Hollywood pantheon while keeping a gimlet eye on its ways and habits and one foot firmly planted outside its door.