‘Chronicles, in enthralling detail, Madonna Louise Ciccone’s path from terrifyingly ambitious trainee dancer to pop colossus, all the while placing her in a wider social and cultural context.’ GUARDIAN MAGAZINE

‘Gabriel charts her extraordinary life, right through to pop icon. She deserves a biographer as meticulous, intelligent and insightful as Gabriel.’ DAILY MAIL

‘Madonna built the house in which nearly all female artists now live . . . A Rebel Life brings home not just her obvious willpower and strength, but her fearlessness and sheer intelligence’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘A fascinating take on one of music’s greatest icons’ BELFAST TELEGRAPH

‘It’s a mark of Gabriel’s skill that she has managed to wrestle this complex, sprawling, eventful life into a book that rarely flags and conveys its subject’s wider significance without tipping into hagiography. We come to understand Madonna the person as well as Madonna the concept: a woman who, for a generation, embodied female artistic, sexual and financial liberation.’ GUARDIAN

In this exceptional biography, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Gabriel chronicles the meteoric rise and enduring influence of the greatest female pop icon of the modern era: Madonna.

With her arrival on the music scene in the early 1980s, Madonna generated nothing short of an explosion – as great as that of Elvis or the Beatles – taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent.

But Madonna was more than just a pop star. Everywhere, fans gravitated to her as an emblem of a new age, one in which feminism could shed the buttoned-down demeanour of the 1970s and feel relevant to a new generation. Amid the scourge of AIDS, she brought queer identities into the mainstream, fiercely defending a person’s right to love whomever – and be whoever – they wanted. Despite fierce criticism, she never separated her music from her political activism. And as an artist, she never stopped experimenting. Madonna existed to push past boundaries by creating provocative, visionary music, videos, films and live performances that changed culture globally.

Deftly tracing Madonna’s story from her Michigan roots to her rise to super-stardom, master biographer Mary Gabriel captures the dramatic life and achievements of one of the greatest artists of our time.

They include Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, whose careers were at times overshadowed by the fame of their husbands, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, but who emerged as stunning talents in their own right, as well as a younger generation: the bold Grace Hartigan, the visionary Helen Frankenthaler, and the fierce Joan Mitchell.

Despite being ostracized by much of the official art world, these women changed American art and society, tearing up the prevailing social code and replacing it with a doctrine of liberation. In NINTH STREET WOMEN, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel tells a remarkable and inspiring story of the power of art and artists in shaping a postwar America that would never be the same.