The popularity of Robert Indiana's LOVE works made the Pop artist a household name?and torpedoed his reputation, precipitating his self-imposed exile from the New York art world that had once acclaimed him and eclipsing the breadth and emotionally powerful content of the rest of his dynamic, conceptually charged work. This book is a compelling reassessment of the artist's contributions to American art during his long and prolific career. Indiana has explored the power of language, American identity, and personal history for five decades. Although his imagery is visually dazzling on its surface and seems to reflect a native spirit of optimism, it contains a multilayered conceptual intricacy and darkness that draw on his own biography as well as on the myths, history, and literature of the United States. This book provides a long overdue analysis of the development of Indiana's career, his relationship to early-20th-century American painters, and his influence on contemporary language-based artists. In addition to an illustrated chronology, selected exhibition history, and selected bibliography, it includes transcripts from roundtable discussions with key Indiana experts, such as Thomas Crow, Bill Katz, Robert Pincus-Witten, Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Robert Storr, Allison Unruh, and John Wilmerding, who offer compelling insights on the significance of Indiana and his art. Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art.