Gershwin

He started out plugging sheet music in Tin Pan Alley and had his first hit at twenty. He lived in two worlds at once all his life — Broadway songwriter, and a man who wanted to be taken seriously as a composer. He asked Ravel for lessons; Ravel replied that he was already a first-rate Gershwin and there was no point becoming a second-rate Ravel.

Rhapsody in Blue was premiered in 1924 and came to him on a train to Boston; the clarinet glissando that opens it began as a player's joke and he kept it. He insisted that Porgy and Bess be cast entirely with Black singers, which was a position with a cost in America in 1935. He died of a brain tumour at thirty-eight.