James Dean was the first American teenager realistically captured by Hollywood, and he stamped adolescence with a half-squinting look of tormented yearning and tentative tenderness. Beautiful and bisexual, Dean remains “the poet of what it’s like to be young, lost, or alone,” one biographer wrote. In his short, meteoric career, he combined small-town midwestern innocence (Indiana childhood, East of Eden [1955]) with mythic Americana (as Jett Rink in Giant [1956]), and urban bohemia (still photos in New York City) with the automotive escapism of suburban high school kids (Rebel Without a Cause [1955]). His appeal came from being “able to expose the emotion on-screen that he couldn’t in real life,” one close friend said. Dean’s persona is still often invoked by young American actors, and his life is now myth, as if captured by the formulaic phrase, “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse.” As one writer claimed about Dean’s cool, “he made adolescent defiance heroic.”