Frank Lloyd Wright

The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson and of Kenneth Clark gives us now a complete and complex portrait of an American titan, Frank Lloyd Wright. Meryle Secrest shows us Frank Lloyd Wright in full scale - the brilliant, outrageous, fascinating man; the giant who changed modern architecture; the standard-bearer for the new, quintessentially American vision; the artist who never, during a seventy-year career, abandoned his principles of design; the radical, the Bohemian - the visionary who was one of the central figures of twentieth-century American culture, society and politics. We see Frank Lloyd Wright's Midwestern boyhood - the son of a Harvard-educated preacher/musician/circuit rider...his seven-year apprenticeship with the great Louis Sullivan...his three marriages - the first at twenty-one to a Chicago society woman and dutiful wife; the second to a woman slightly mad; the third to a fiercely independent woman: an acolyte of Gurdjieff, a dancer, a woman who was Wright's counterpart and peer. We see Wright's evolution from impeccably dressed young architect, living in the right suburb, cultivating rich clients, to true bohemian living by his own rules. Meryle Secrest follows the course of Wright's struggle against all that was middlebrow in America - his opposition to the architectural trend that resulted in "coffin-like houses and topless towers" and his insistence on expressing the unique in human experience. We see Wright creating his famous and seminal houses, among them the Winslow house he designed at age twenty-seven...his long-dreamed-of Taliesin (when it burned to the ground, set blaze by an insane servant, Wright rebuilt it on the same spot)...the ImperialHotel in Tokyo (the only building left standing after the 1923 earthquake)...the famous Fallingwater...the mammoth and idiosyncratic Guggenheim Museum in New York... Meryle Secrest is the first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Her life of the architect, more than five years' work and illustrated with 121 photographs, is a stunning feat of biographical narrative, sustained analysis and compassionate insight. With her extraordinary grasp of the man and his art, she gives us Frank Lloyd Wright close up - a creature of boundless energy and indomitable appetite for experience, a man whose limitless belief in his own rightness carried him through bankruptcy, arrest, fire, divorce and years of social ostracism. A riveting portrait of a genius.