"I'll never forget the excitement I felt after seeing 'Pather Panchali,'" Akira Kurosawa said. Satyajit Ray's three films about Apu's childhood, adolescence, and manhood, Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and The World of Apu (1959), collectively known as The Apu Trilogy, are world cinema classics. Satyajit Ray received an Academy Award for lifetime achievement in 1992, just before his death, as a result of the Trilogy. This book, written by Ray's biographer and world authority Andrew Robinson, is the first comprehensive examination of the Trilogy. Robinson, who got to know the director well over the last decade of his career, discusses the films' literary and cultural context, production, and music by Ravi Shankar.