George Gershwin, named Jacob Gershovitz at his birth, was born in Brooklyn, New York on September 26, 1898. He was the second of four children born to Morris and Rose Gershovitz, Russian immigrants who had come to the United States to marry. The family bought a piano for George's older brother Ira, but it was twelve year old George that surprised them all with his musical aptitude. In 1912 he began taking piano lessons with Charles Hambitzer who, as Gershwin's strongest musical influence, introduced him to the music of Chopin, Debussy, Ravel, and the early works of Arnold Schoenberg.

At the age of 15, Gershwin left school and took a job with music publisher Jerome K. Remick & Co. as Tin Pan Alley's youngest song-plugger ever. Earning $15 a week, Gershwin was a salesman, promoting the firm's songs by playing and singing them for performers. The job kept him at a piano for many hours a day and, because of this, his playing improved greatly and he became a highly skilled vocal accompanist. During this time he began to compose pieces of his own but, getting very little encouragement from his employers, Gershwin left Remick in 1917 to work on the Vaudeville circuit as a pianist. A year later his compositions attracted the attention of the head of the Harms Publishing Company, the leading publisher of music for the Broadway stage, and he was hired as a staff composer.

Gershwin's first Broadway show, La, La, Lucille, opened in May of 1919 and ran for one hundred performances. A year later Gershwin's song "Swanee," which he had written in 1918, was recorded by the popular singer Al Jolson and became the greatest hit of his career. In 1920 alone, the song sold over two millions copies and earned the composer more than $10,000 in royalties. That same year he signed a contract with producer George White under which he composed the music for five annual Broadway reviews from 1920-1924. Under separate agreements with other producers, he composed the scores for three Broadway shows in New York as well as two shows in London. Primrose, the second of his two London shows, was a great success and it was followed in the same year by Lady Be Good!, starring Fred and Adele Astaire. Lady Be Good! was his first collaboration with his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin, a partnership that would continue for the rest of the composer's life. Together they wrote many more successful musicals including Oh Kay! and Funny Face. While continuing to compose popular music for the stage, Gershwin challenged himself by writing instrumental music.

When he was 25 years old, his jazz-influenced Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York's Aeolian Hall. The audience included such noted figures as Jascha Heifitz, Fritz Kreisler, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Rachmaninov, and Igor Stravinsky. It was a concert that almost never happened. One month earlier Gershwin's brother Ira had noticed a small newspaper ad announcing that George had agreed to write a "Jazz Concerto" to be performed by Paul Whiteman's Orchestra the following month. To his horror Ira realized that his brother had not started working on the commission and the work was already receiving attention from the press. Once his brother had reminded him of the promised music, Gershwin set to work on the piece the very next day. He happened to be traveling by train to Boston and much of the inspiration for Rhapsody in Blue came from the rhythms of the train he heard on the trip. The performance on February 12, 1924 won both audience and critical approval, labeling Gershwin as the man who brought Jazz into the concert hall.

The success of Rhapsody in Blue led Gershwin to write more pieces for piano and orchestra including Concerto in F in 1925 and An American in Paris in 1928. In the early thirties, Gershwin experimented with some new ideas in Broadway musicals. Strike Up the Band, Let 'Em Eat Cake, and Of Thee I Sing were innovative works dealing with social issues of the time. Of Thee I Sing was a major hit and the first comedy ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 1936, Gershwin and his brother Ira signed a contract with RKO Film studios and moved to Hollywood. The songs they supplied for such films as Shall We Dance?, A Damsel in Distress, and The Goldwyn Follies were among their best collaborative works. In between these projects, Gershwin continued to study harmony and composition with Joseph Schillinger and during this time he wrote the Cuban Overture, a set of Variations for piano and orchestra on the song I Got Rhythm, and his magnum opus, the opera Porgy and Bess.

Since 1926, when he first read the novel, Gershwin had considered the idea of composing a full-length opera based on DeBose Heyward's Porgy, a story about life among black inhabitants of "Catfish Row" in Charleston, South Carolina. After many delays, Heyward and the Gershwin brothers signed a contract with the Theatre Guild of New York. While writing the piece, Gershwin stayed in South Carolina absorbing the local influences. When the work was finally completed in 1935, the 700 pages of music represented Gershwin's most ambitious creation and his favorite composition. Billed as an American folk opera, Porgy and Bess opened in New York in October of 1935 in a Broadway theatre, rather than an opera house and received mixed reviews. Today, the opera is revered by many as one of the finest examples of grand opera ever written by an American composer and thought to be Gershwin's greatest musical achievement.

In early 1937, barely more than a year after the opera's release, Gershwin began to experience headaches, dizzy spells, and blackouts, but continued to compose and perform in public. On July 9, 1937 he fell suddenly into a coma. Doctors discovered a brain tumor and performed emergency surgery. However, on the morning of July 11, 1937, Gershwin died at the age of thirty-eight. His untimely death was a truly shocking and unexpected event, since he was seemingly on the threshold of even greater musical achievements. Today Gershwin remains one of America's most beloved popular musicians.