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gone to Hollywood with one of the most generous contracts ever offered by the film factories; he had cowritten, produced, directed, and starred in what is arguably the most important American movie since the birth of the talkies. A fatalist would say that the gods, or the laws of success, were bound to turn against him.
    And something ostensibly like that did happen. Welles went on to make an extraordinary series of films after
Citizen Kane
, films that give the lie to the notion that he was “self-destructive” or wasteful of his talent; none of these subsequent projects, however, gave him the same combination of freedom and technical resources, and he was never again to orchestrate such a talented group of people. Even if
Kane
did not exist, Welles would still be included in the pantheon of American filmmakers, but having made that picture at an early age, he created expectations for his career that probably no one could have fulfilled.
    The spectacular events that led up to Welles’s early success have been told many times, in magazine profiles for the
New Yorker
(1938) and the
Saturday Evening Post
(1940); in two early, now out of print, books, Roy Fowler’s
Orson Welles
and Peter Noble’s
The Fabulous Orson Welles
; and in five later biographies, which I list in order of their appearance: Charles Higham’s
Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius
(1985), Frank Brady’s
Citizen Welles
(1989), Barbara Learning’s
Orson Welles
(1985), Simon Callow’s
Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
(1995) and
Hello Americans
(2006), and Patrick McGilligan’s
Young Orson
(2015). John Houseman and Micheál MacLiammóir, former associates possessed of considerable theatrical and literary talent, have written their own recollections, and Welles himself was interviewed many, many times. I do not propose to go over familiar ground in much detail, but a sketch of the more important episodes, and a description of some early works by Welles that have not been discussed by previous writers, may help place
Citizen Kane
and the subsequent films in their proper context.
I
    Although Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he always reminded his biographers that he was conceived in either Paris or Rio while his parents were on a world tour. From the beginning, therefore, he was a gypsy. He was the second son of prosperous and eccentric Midwestern parents, and his upbringing was anything but conventionally bourgeois—in fact it was exactly the sort of childhood that produces a misfit, a prodigy, or both.
    Welles’s father, Richard Head Welles, was in his forties when the boy was born. He had a good income from several wagon factories and earned still more as an inventor, the money enabling him to be a bon vivant—the sort of character his son would grow up trying to emulate. “Dick” Welles had traveled on three continents, maintaining a winter home in Jamaica, making pals with celebrities, and, according to the
New Yorker
, having a restaurant, a cigar, and a racehorse named after him. He married the former Beatrice Ives, daughter of a Springfield, Illinois, family that had boasted a friendship with Abraham Lincoln. Mrs. Welles, a beautiful, active woman, was a gifted concert pianist and a suffragette; she is known to have written a life of Jesus, and at her death she was preparing to tour the country giving poetry readings to music.
    George Orson (named in memory of his distant relative George Ade and Chicago businessman Orson C. Wells) was a sickly child and spent his earliest years in an environment as chaotic as anything he experienced afterward. His parents had a troubled relationship and were divorced when he was six. Beatrice then took the boy to Chicago, where he lived in a musical salon. (Even as a baby, he had been in demand as a sort of prop for the Chicago Opera.) His mother died unexpectedly three years later, and Welles was obviously shaken by the event; he was