This is a biography of Billy Strayhorn, who wrote and arranged many of the most significant music of the Ellington Orchestra between 1940 and 1967. Billy Strayhorn lived his too-short life in the giant shadow cast by Duke Ellington. He rarely shared the limelight with his mentor and leader. His compositions, of which Take the A Train, Lush Life and Passion Flower are some of the best known, are increasingly important to younger musicians and to a wide public. Hardly a year goes by without the release of another album of reverential versions of his tunes. And like his peers, Strayhorn's life was marked, and eventually shortened, by tragic levels of stress and self-destruction. Strayhorn was a cultured, black intellectual. He was also openly gay, at a time when this was brave and unusual, and in a culture - that of the male jazz musician - notably unsympathetic to homosexuality. Content to let Ellington play the role of flamboyant leader, Strayhorn nonetheless suffered from his marginalization. He took refuge in a stylized world of cafe society, of late nights, good food and fine clothes - and in drink.