By twenty-three, Welles had founded his own theater company and revolutionized radio with his infamous broadcast of The War of the Worlds. By twenty-five, he had secured his place in history with his debut film, Citizen Kane. Yet four films and less than a decade later, his career suffered a spectacular collapse. Welles, once the most promising director in America, was written off as a ‘would-be genius’-a bad bet in an increasingly money-conscious industry. It would be many years before his later works such as Touch of Evil and The Other Side of the Wind received widespread acclaim. So how did the boy wonder from Wisconsin amount to so much, and yet so little? In The Giant, Youssef Daoudi weaves together reality and mythology to create a radical new look at one of Hollywood’s most legendary figures.