624 pages | 1st October, 2019 | Non-fiction | Biographies & Memoirs
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.
"Hendrickson’s focus is on the all-too-often overlooked evidence of Wright’s own vulnerabilities, so 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."
Architectural Digest
"The contradictory Wright who emerges, both hateful and human, is probably the truest portrait of the man we have yet."
Evening Standard
"Dazzling. . . Ingenious. . . Plagued by Fire has moments of raw emotional power."
The American Scholar
"Hendrickson is one of our great stylists."
Boston Globe
"A masterful portrait of the flawed creator of flawless buildings."
Simon Jenkins, author of A Short History of Europe
"Paul Hendrickson has managed to take the life of one of the most complex and difficult of American artists and restore some measure of human-ness to him in this riveting work."
Ken Burns
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book Sons of Mississippi. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. Hemingway’s Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, DC.
US: Knopf
Audio: Random House Audio