Plagued By Fire
The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning and best-selling author of Hemingway's Boat – a ground-breaking biography that illuminates the life, mind and work of one of the icons of twentieth-century America.
Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as both a supreme artist and an insufferable egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius as an architect. But in this masterly work we discover a man dogged by traumas, racked by lies, and stifled by the myths he wove around himself: a man aware of the choices he made, and of their costs.
This is the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this is the Wright of many other overlooked aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; 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 servant gone mad; and the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his eventful life.
Showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a deep and more human understanding of the man, and a fresh appreciation of his monumental artistic achievements. With prodigious research, unique vision and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic and brilliant, he has given us the defining book on one of the greatest creative talents of twentieth-century America.
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.
