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Loading... Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright| 83 | 3 | 325,652 | 
(3.71) | None | Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home by a black servant gone mad. In showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright.… (more) |
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| Epigraph |
The true poem is the poet's mind; the true ship is the shipbuilder. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, "History"  Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitude.) -Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory. -Ali Smith, in an interview in The New York Times You shouldn't judge the artist for the art. -Sally Mann, in an email to the author And so, by a long detour, we come back to the original question, whether character and art are correlated. The answer is that they are, but in a complicated fashion. Masterpieces can be produced by rascals or crazies or even, at times, by accident; but I refuse to think that they can be produced by genuine scoundrels, "men without honor or virtue." The artist, no matter what his sins may be, is bent on giving himself away... -Malcolm Cowley, "And I worked at the Writer's Table" | |
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For Tim Samuelson, who took me to a stone | |
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In a way, this is a book about standing at stones.
Frank Lloyd Wright was born two years after the end of the Civil War and died not quite two years after the launch of Sputnik - ninety-one years and ten months on the earth. In the approximate middle of that near-century span, on August 15, 1914, when he was forty-seven, the greatest architect America has yet produced suffered a personal catastrophe that would have destroyed a man of lesser will and lesser ego, although perhaps that is saying the same thing twice. -Prologue, Out of the Old Testament: August 15, 1914 Mother-fueled, father-ghosted, here he comes now, nineteen years old, almost twenty, out of the long grasses of the Wisconsin prairie, a kid, a rube, a bumpkin by every estimate except his own, off a Chicago and North Western train at the Wells Street Station on the north bank of the Chicago River, on a drizzly late winter or early spring evening in 1887. -Part 1, The Enigma of Arrival | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home by a black servant gone mad. In showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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A heavy slow read. (