Rock star, school clown, subverter of norms, joker, peace activist and eccentric millionaire... - all this is John Lennon, creator of the Beatles, one of the greatest and most mythologized musicians of the twentieth century. Writer and journalist Ray Connolly has created a detailed chronicle of this troubled life - from a lonely childhood in post-war Liverpool to murder by a crazed fan - showing Lennon as a complex, contradictory, not always "good" or pleasant person, but always alive, sincere and passionate. Connolly was closely acquainted with Lennon and interviewed him and other Beatles more than once. In this book, he draws on his rich archive of documents, as well as personal conversations with John, his first and second wives - Cynthia Lennon and Yoko Ono - and many others involved in the events. He is trying to truly understand his hero, who constantly reinvented himself and his biography, and to get to the bottom of the reasons for his actions, including strange and unexpected ones. This voluminous work contains a lot of fascinating details from the life of Lennon, the history of the Beatles and the entire era of the 1960s, but without the textbook gloss, honest and unbiased.