Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography

by Meryle Secrest

Overview

Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography focuses on Wright's family history, personal adventures, and colorful friends and family. Secrest had unprecedented access to an archive of over one hundred thousand of Wright's letters, photographs, drawings, and books. She also interviewed surviving devotees, students, and relatives. The result is an explicit portrait of both the genius architect and the provocative con-man.

"Secrest seizes the themes most evocative of certain of our cultural myths, forging them into a coherent and emotionally plausible narrative."--New Republic

"An engaging narrative."--New York Times Book Review

"The real triumph of this biography . . . is the link it makes between Frank Lloyd Wright's personal life and his architecture."--The Economist

"Secrest's achievement is to etch Wright's character in sharp relief. . . . [She] presents Wright in his every guise."-Blair Kamin, Chicago Tribune

"An extremely engaging profile."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A spellbinding portrait."--Library Journal

"The best [biography] so far, a huge and definitive accumulation of fact."--Time

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226744148
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/08/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	652
Sales rank:	273,149
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Meryle Secrest has written biographies of, among others, Romaine Brooks, Bernard Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Salvador Dalí, Stephen Sondheim, and Frank Lloyd Wright, the last available from the Unviersity of Chicago Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Bedd Taliesin: Taliesin's Grave
2. The Black Spot
3. The Shining Brow
4. Aladdin
5. Lieber Meister
6. Sermons in Stones
7. A House Divided
8. Flower in the Crannied Wall
9. Lord of Her Waking Dreams
10. The Cauldron
11. The Cause Conservative
12. A Stern Chase
13. Truth Against the World
14. Work Song
15. The World's Greatest Architect
16. Taliesin
17. Broad Acres
18. The Revolutionist as Architect
19. That Strange Disease, Humility
20. The Shining Land
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

In this superb, subtle, demythologizing biography of Wright (1869-1959), we meet a shrewd yet gullible architect who fostered a view of himself as a misunderstood, embattled genius, a narcissist who unconsciously courted catastrophe while blaming the vengeful hand of fate as he overcame accidents, bankruptcy, lawsuits and hounding by his morphine-addicted second wife. Drawing on a trove of letters, Secrest ( Salvador Dali ) traces Wright's ``secret conviction of worthlessness'' to the contradictory influences of his freethinking, erratic Welsh mother and his jealous, spendthrift father, a New England minister. She discusses the dynamics of the architect's three marriages, recounts his clashes with Louis Sullivan and Lewis Mumford, and digs beneath his ``quasi-mystical Celtic beliefs'' to pinpoint the multiple influences on his fervent quest for an organic architecture. A definitive portrait of a mercurial titan. Photos. BOMC and QPB alternates. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wright remains for many historians America's preeminent architect; although he died over 30 years ago, the force of his personality and the strength of his reputation endure untarnished. Several excellent biographies on Wright have appeared since his death, most notably Robert C. Twombly's Frank Lloyd Wright ( LJ 2/15/73) and Brendan Gill's Many Masks ( LJ 11/15/87). Secrest's book joins this select company and more than manages to hold its own: It is a spellbinding portrait of this complex, often contradictory architect. Drawing on the massive archives of the Wright Memorial Foundation, Secrest writes with authority and compassion about Wright's long and turbulent career. Her exhaustive scholarship provides fresh insights into Wright's personality, making this biography essential reading for anyone with an interest in American architecture. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/92; see also the review of Frank Lloyd Wright's Collected Writings , Vol. 1, p. 175.--Ed.-- H. Ward Jandl, National Park Svce., Washington, D.C.

Library Journal

Reprint of the 1992 edition rendered here with no additions. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Engrossing story of the Balzac-scaled life of the great architect. Wright (1867-1959) was born in Wisconsin to a Welsh family of radical thinkers and was nurtured to be an architect by his mother, who told him he was destined for greatness. He dropped out of the Univ. of Wisconsin after two semesters to take a draftsman's job at a week, and soon was working for the master architect Louis Sullivan (inventor of the skyscraper). Within a year, Wright had become chief designer at Adler and Sullivan and also had married the first of his three wives. In the next 30 years, he was to abandon his wife and six children (and his phenomenally successful practice), calling marriage a "barnyard institution. I am a wild bird"; marry a morphine- addicted heiress and follower of Mary Baker Eddy who was killed by an axe-stroke to the brain by an insane servant; marry a Serbian beauty 30 years his junior who was an instructor for G.I. Gurdjieff; build his beloved house Taliesen (East) three times—it twice burned to the ground; time and again ingeniously raise prodigious sums of money and spend them in profligate excess; revive his career with the building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo—the only major structure to remain undamaged in the largest earthquake of the century in 1923 in Japan; and go on to greater triumphs, culminating with the Guggenheim Museum in 1956. Secrest (Salvador Dali, 1986, etc.), who had access to the newly opened archives at Wright's Memorial Foundation, does a superb job in telling the human side of Wright's story. And without allowing it to overmaster her narrative, she provides clear architectural background to explicate Wright's designs, stature, and influence.Definitive. (Photographs—121—some seen.)

Kirkus Reviews