Ned Rorem is celebrated as one of America's greatest living composers. His diary of his early years, The Paris Diary and the New York Diary, was widely acclaimed. The Later Diaries continues one of the most sustained efforts in the intimate journal form ever undertaken and offers candid insights into his astonishing life, career, art, friendships, and love. In these years, Lions, Miss Julie, and Poems of Love and the Rain were composed and most of his books written; he also continued to meet the famous and infamous and to write of them with the charm that Janet Flanner characterized as "worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet."