xv, 468 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : 21 cm

"Certainly no singer has been more mythologized and more misunderstood than Billie Holiday, who helped to create much of the mystique herself with her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, "Now, finally, we have a definitive biography," said Booklist of Donald Clarke's Billie Holiday, "by a deeply compassionate, respectful, and open-minded biographer (whose) portrait embraces every facet of Holiday's paradoxical nature, from her fierceness to her vulnerability, her childlikeness to her innate elegance and amazing strength." Donald Clarke was given unrivaled access to a treasure trove of interviews from the 1970's - interviews with those who knew Lady Day from her childhood in the streets and good-time houses of Baltimore through the early days of success in New York and into the years of fame, right up to her tragic decline and death at the age of forty-four. Clarke uses these interviews to separate fact from fiction, creating what Newsday called "a thoroughly riveting account of Holiday and her milieu.--Jacket

Includes index

Originally published as: Wishing on the moon : the life and times of Billie Holiday

An African-American nation -- Baltimore -- The point -- Harlem -- The first records, and triumph at the Apollo -- The Teddy Wilson era -- The street that never slept -- On the road with the Big Bands -- 1937-9: strange fruit -- The War years -- Triumph and trouble -- The jailbird -- The gangster and the bassist -- The last decade begins -- The last merry-go-round: fun, fights and fame -- Intimations of mortality -- The triumphant decline of lady day -- The loneliest girl in the world -- Coda: the lady is an icon