Who are the Kennedys? Are they the brilliant, heroic, extraordinary people their admirers believe them to be? Or are they arrogant, competitive, self-absorbed children of a willful and immensely rich patriarch, as their detractors claim? In fact, they are all of these things and more.

Years in the making, based on hundreds of interviews with family members and associates and extensive research into archives and sources unused until now, this is the nationwide bestseller whose very publication caused an uproar in the press—the first and only book to fully penetrate the Kennedy inner sanctum and reveal the true, all-too-human saga behind America's most famous family.

An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyalties and myths, bringing the story of four generations of "America's family" fully into view. Collier and Horowitz capture the strain of ambition, the dynastic ebb and flow, the invention of a mythic identity, the corrosive underside of the dream of Camelot—developed over four generations—that led one young Kennedy to say, "We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them." The Kennedys: An American Drama is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall.