"While wildly successful and good-natured outwardly, Liberace, Pyron reveals, was a complicated man whose political, social, and religious conservatism existed side-by-side with a lifetime of secret homosexuality. Liberace: An American Boy relates this private man to the public persona and places this remarkable life in the rapidly changing cultural landscape of the United States in the twentieth century.".

"Pyron presents Liberace's life as a metaphor, for both good and ill, of modern America, with its endless shopping malls and insatiable hunger for celebrity. In this biography, Pyron complicates and celebrates our images of the man for whom the streets were paved with gold lame and whose excesses helped destroy him."--BOOK JACKET.