James Byron Dean was an actor who died just before sundown on September 30, 1955, when his Porsche collided with another car at a fork in the road not 900 yards east of The Tree of Heaven. He was 24 years old. Aside from appearing in several Broadway plays, he starred in three motion pictures—East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant—and only East of Eden had been released before his death. Even before he was buried, he had already become a legend, and his screen presence endured daily in cinemas and on television around the world. He came to embody a youth yearning for warmth between parents and their offspring, an individual struggling in a huge land of infinite promise and many races, and a rebel searching for a cause. Seemingly ordinary yet uniquely gifted in talent and individuality, he came to personify an awakened generation, and his brief life was remembered as one whose sudden end made him endure all the more powerfully.