The extraordinary life—the first—of the legendary, undercelebrated Hollywood director known in his day as “Wild Bill” (and he was!) Wellman, whose eighty-two movies (six of them uncredited), many of them iconic; many of them sharp, cold, brutal; others poetic, moving; all of them a lesson in close-up art, ranged from adventure and gangster pictures to comedies, aviation, romances, westerns, and searing social dramas with Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Clint Eastwood.

Among his iconic pictures: the pioneering World War I epic Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture), Public Enemy (the toughest gangster picture of them all), Nothing Sacred, the original A Star Is Born, Beggars of Life, The Call of the Wild, The Ox-Bow Incident, Battleground, The High and the Mighty...

Now William Wellman, Jr., drawing on his father’s unpublished letters, diaries, and unfinished memoir, gives us the first full portrait of the man. Here is a revealing, boisterous portrait of the handsome, tough-talking, hard-drinking, uncompromising maverick; a portrait of a profoundly American spirit and visionary, a man’s man who was able to put into cinematic storytelling the most subtle and fulsome of feeling, a man feared, respected, and loved.