Plagued by Fire
The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Conflagrations physical and emotional illuminate America's greatest architect in this melodramatic biography. National Book Critics Circle Award winner Hendrickson (Hemingway's Boat) tries to humanize the famously arrogant Frank Lloyd Wright by focusing on episodes of trauma and regret. Centering the book is the 1914 murders by hatchet of Wright's lover and six others by Julian Carlton, a mentally ill servant, at Wright's Taliesin house, which Carlton burned. Hendrickson's lurid, repetitive account details the carnage and Wright's distraught reaction, delves into Carlton's enslaved forebears, and lurches forward to the 1921 Tulsa race riot, which Wright's cousin stoked with inflammatory newspaper articles; Hendrickson frames it all as a vaguely connected thread of racial tragedy. The haphazard narrative also explores Wright's stormy relationship with his second wife, his possibly homosexual relationship with another architect, his misrepresentation of his parents' marital troubles, and violent deaths among owners of Wright-designed houses. Hendrickson's novelistic treatment "Mother-fueled, father-ghosted, here comes now, 19 years old, almost 20, out of the long grasses of the Wisconsin prairie" meticulously researches facts but wildly overinterprets them; he is forever reading subtext into stray remarks and scanning family photographs for signs of inner psychology. His appreciations of Wright's architecture are insightful and evocative, but readers seeking a systematic, judicious Wright bio should look elsewhere.
