Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballets by George Balanchine

Former New York City Ballet ballet maestro George Balanchine began his career at the Imperial Russian Ballet Academy. He eventually joined Europe's famed Diaghilev company, where he rose through the ranks to become ballet master at the age of twenty-one. He traveled to New York in 1933 to create the School of American Ballet at the invitation of Lincoln Kirstein. He has worked as a ballet master for a number of companies, and his ballets are performed by prestigious ensembles both in the United States and overseas. Apollo, Prodigal Son, Symphony in C, Orpheus, Agon, Liebeslieder Walzer, and the full-length A Midsummer Night's Dream are among the more than 100 ballets he has choreographed.

Since 1950, when he became The Hudson Review's first ballet reviewer, Francis Mason has been writing about dance. He has served as president of the Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance's board of directors, vice president of Ballet Review, and member of the New York Public Library's Committee for the Dance Collection. For two volumes of George Balanchine's Complete Tales of the Great Ballets, he collaborated with him.