Sol Hurok was the twentieth century’s most famous concert impresario — the man behind the “S. Hurok Presents” billing that carried Marian Anderson, Arthur Rubinstein, Feodor Chaliapin and Van Cliburn to American stages. Born in the Russian Empire in 1888, he emigrated in 1906 and became a naturalised American in 1914. He arranged Anderson’s landmark 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert and brought the Bolshoi Ballet to the United States in 1959, and he talked about box office with the fatalism of a man who had spent fifty years selling tickets.