Entertainment Weekly calculated that, at the pace Simon Callow is going in his biography of Orson Welles, the third and final volume will be 2,812 pages long. Hello Americans picks up from volume one, The Road to Xanadu (1995), which ended with the screening of Citizen Kane in May 1941. Hello Americans covers the consequences of the film and what drove Welles to exile in Europe in 1947. Callow takes 444 pages to cover six years, not counting the notes and index. What's surprising is how he manages, with only a few lapses of pace, to fit in everything. Welles was ablaze with genius - radio, essays, plays, musicals, politics, the UN, civil rights. He slept with lots of women too, including wife Rita Hayworth. Callow suggests that Welles was embarking on an 'experimental journey of discovery'. 'In seeking new forms he was not avoiding responsibility for his genius: he was trying to find out what precisely he was and to fulfil it as best he could. This is, it seems to me, a tale of heroism, not of self-destruction.' Alan Warner, reviewing in The Guardian, was 'dry-mouthed with anticipation for his final, third volume'.