In 1933, George Balanchine arrived in the United States, brought by even younger sponsors who had dreamed of inventing an American ballet. He came with extraordinary skills: he had trained as a child in Russia's imperial dance academy, he had absorbed the utopian ideals of the Russian revolution, and he had spent nine years in a culturally volatile interwar Europe. But on a new continent, his career was blocked by local biases, global politics, and even his own character. His sponsors had their own ideas of what this new art should look like. A bigger-scale, European-based ballet company was crowding into the U.S. arts scene. A combination of Balanchine's loneliness and ill-health, both traceable to the revolutionary turmoil of his native city, St. Petersburg, were pushing him towards romantic obsessions with young female dancers - obsessions that seem today to border on the unethical. Balanchine Finds His America provides a close-up of this crucial time in the life of a young