“As far as I’m concerned, previous books have failed to capture the importance and influence of this woman, her complex personality and the dimensions of her artistic drive,” said Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Senior Executive Editor, George Hodgman.

The biography, titled Hello, Gorgeous, will publish in fall 2012 to coincide with Streisand’s 50th anniversary in show business.

Barbra Streisand has been for nearly fifty years not only a superlative American artist (singer, actress, director); she has established herself as perhaps the most successful figure in the history of American show business.

“All of Streisandia, of which I am a founding resident,” says Hodgman, “has been waiting for the real, class-act Barbra bio. William Mann has set out to do nothing less than a book that will stand the test of time as the definitive record and truly a portrait of an artist.”

The book will cover Streisand’s childhood and growing up along with the birth of her career in the clubs of Greenwich Village, the recording of her early albums and stage appearances, Funny Girl on Broadway and later the filming of that musical, which won her the Academy Award, in Hollywood. Hello, Gorgeous will climax with her triumphant “Happening in Central Park” concert which drew 135,000 New Yorkers in September of 1968.

William Mann is the author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn about which David Thomson said, “this is a book that sets new standards in movie biography,” and was also praised by Gore Vidal, Patricia Bosworth and Gerald Clarke and named a New York Times Notable Book. For his next book, How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, Mann spoke to previously reticent sources (including Mike Nichols) and gained access to the private papers of George Stevens, George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, Ernest Lehman and Hedda Hopper.