Maria Tallchief: The Osage Ballerina Who Conquered the World

Pawhuska, 1925. On a hill above the Osage Agency, two small girls in flour-sack dresses dance to a phonograph in the front room while their mother, who was forbidden dance lessons as a girl in Kansas, watches from the doorway. Down the hill the derricks nod, oil money arrives in quarterly headright payments, and the men who covet that money have begun to kill for it.

The older girl was Maria Tallchief. She would become America's first prima ballerina, the dancer for whom George Balanchine created his Firebird in 1949, and one of the founding stars of New York City Ballet. This biography follows her from the headright years and the piano lessons through the wartime Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ballet Society and the birth of City Ballet, and on to the long American tours, with her sister Marjorie, a ballerina in her own right, never far from the story.

A portrait of a great artist that never loses sight of the family and the nation behind her, and of what it meant to dance for the Osage people on the grandest stages of the century.