Madonna

In this riveting biography, acclaimed author Mary Gabriel chronicles the meteoric rise and enduring influence of the woman who may be the greatest 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 or Michael Jackson--taking the nation by storm with her liberated politics and breathtaking talent. Within two years of her 1983 debut album, a shopping mall in California was nicknamed "The Madonna Mall" because it was overrun with "Material Girls." Later that year, the flagship Macy's store in Manhattan held a Madonna lookalike contest featuring Andy Warhol as a judge, and opened a department called "Madonna-land."

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 demeanor of the '60s and '70s and feel relevant to a new generation. Even as she topped charts again and again, Madonna matured as an artist, taking strides forward with every album and creating provocative, visionary music, videos, and live performances. She brought queer identities into the mainstream, fiercely defending a person's right to love whomever--and be whoever--they wanted. And, despite fierce criticism, she never separated her music from her political activism.

Deftly tracing Madonna's story from her Michigan roots to her rise to super-stardom, from her years of struggle to find her artistic voice to her larger-than-life concerts for hundreds of millions of fans all over the world, master biographer Mary Gabriel captures the dramatic life and achievements of one of the greatest musical artists of our time.
About the Author: Mary Gabriel is the author of Ninth Street Women, Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art, which won the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for narrative nonfiction and the 2019 Library of Virginia and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts's Mary Lynn Kotz Award. Gabriel's previous book, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored and The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone. She worked in Washington and London as a Reuters editor for nearly two decades and lives in Ireland.