Plagued by Fire

Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius as an architect. The Wright who fully understood and suffered from the choices he made has until now been more hidden. And equally real but neglected is the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his eventful life.

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 is the Wright of many other overlooked aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; and 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.

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 brilliant, he has given us the defining book on one of the greatest creative talents of twentieth-century America.