Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright - Paul Hendrickson Audiobook

Written by Paul Hendrickson
Read by Arthur Morey
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Books on Tape
Release date: October 1, 2019
Duration: 24:49:45

Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt most 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 Tulsa race riots of 1921 and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home by a black servant gone mad. Hendrickson, showing us Wright’s facades along with their cracks, 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.

From The New York Times review … “Architecture’s Most Irredeemable Cad” was an imaginative innovator but also a scoundrel. In his 91 years, Wright, who suffered a raft of personal tragedies, concocted an intoxicating elixir of a persona, mixing rank self-aggrandizement with no-way-but-forward tenacity. He wore flamboyant, dandyish outfits and conducted ostentatiously public adulterous affairs. A gifted, relentless self-promoter, he devoted his picaresque life to convincing people that he, as visionary truth-teller, would repeatedly rise from life’s devastation to triumph over the opprobrium of a blinkered society.