"A man of prodigious genius and infinite curiosity, the eminently Victorian John Ruskin explored the entire landscape of human knowledge, from botany and geology to economics, art criticism, and social theory. He championed the painter J. M. W. Turner, the poetry of Wordsworth, and Gothic architecture. He inspired Proust and Gandhi. Works like his incomparable Stones of Venice fathered a new generation of English aesthetes, while his indictment of Victorian industrialism and capitalist enterprise in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century nurtured the ethical socialists who would strive to establish a new political order for the working class.". "This biography celebrates the life and career that made this romantic visionary singly the most influential cultural figure of his day. Nor does it overlook the darker side of Ruskin's genius: neither the emotional plight that thwarted his marriage to Effie Gray and eventually drove her into the arms of his protege, the artist John Everett Millais, nor the obsessive desires that later - after the death of Rose La Touche, the young girl he consumingly loved - thrust him into extended bouts with madness for two decades."--BOOK JACKET.