Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg is responsible for some of the most successful films of all time: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and the 'Indiana Jones' series. Yet for many years most critics condescendingly regarded Spielberg as a child-man incapable of dealing maturely with the complexities of life. The deeper levels of meaning in his films were largely ignored. This changed with Schindler's List, his masterpiece about a gentile businessman who saves eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust. For Spielberg, the film was the culmination of a long struggle with his Jewish identity - an identity of which he had long been ashamed, but now triumphantly embraced. In his astute and perceptive biography, Joseph McBride reconciles Spielberg's seeming contradictions and produces a coherent portrait of the man who found a way to transmute the anxieties of his own childhood into some of the most emotionally powerful and viscerally exciting films ever made.