Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
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.
“A whole new way of seeing an American icon.”
“Important, revelatory. . . . Hendrickson employs tremendously rigorous research to interrogate the myths that hang around his larger-than-life subject.”
“Beautifully written. . . . Absolutely riveting.”
“A vast, sweeping book. . . . Wright’s life emerges with new clarity as a Shakespearean scale drama.”
“As [Hendrickson] travels the arc of Wright’s life, his investigation into its deepest mysteries achieves a powerful momentum. . . . Hendrickson’s inspired storytelling is worthy of its subject.”
“The book’s most moving passages come from fresh insights from the architect’s archives. . . . Plagued by Fire aims not to examine the work of an architect but rather to render the architect with human character.”
“Hendrickson is one of our great stylists.”
“The contradictory Wright who emerges, both hateful and human, is probably the truest portrait of the man we have yet.”