From Publishers Weekly
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. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
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 $8.00 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.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


From Book News, Inc.
Reprint of the 1992 edition rendered here with no additions. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.


Book Description
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




From the Publisher
An enthralling, full-scale biography of the outrageous, influential, and brilliant architect.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 Imperial Hotel 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 archite

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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.)