Tom's Two Cents : Plagued by Fire by Paul Hendrickson

Just when one thinks the last word has been written on the famous and infamous Frank Lloyd Wright, along come a new biography, much of it reading like a novel, covering both old and new ground.  Paul Hendrickson, a former journalist for The Washington Post, is of a sort, a novelist, a psychologist, and a genealogist, all rolled into one, for he is obviously not content just to dig out “the facts” about Wright and report them objectively.  He is searcher for that elusive thing we call “the truth,” something that in our day and time is perhaps more elusive than ever before.

For those of you not familiar with the hierarchy of American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright has long dominated that field, though his name and reputation have often been eclipsed by others of equal note, though perhaps not of equal talent or genius.  Born in Wisconsin in 1869 of a sensitive clergyman/musician father and a highly neurotic, ambitious mother, Wright found his passion early in life, apprenticing in his early twenties to one of the founding fathers of American architecture, Louis Sullivan, in Chicago, not long after, breaking with his mentor to found his own unique “prairie style” and establishing a predominance in domestic architecture through the cultivation of wealthy avant-garde clients, who wanted to escape from the stereotypical Victorian house of the 1890’s.

Wright was famous by 1910 and a ‘has-been’ by 1930, having been eclipsed by the so-called “international style,” created in Germany in the 20’s by Arthur Gropius and Mies Van Der Rohe.

But he went on to re-capture his fame, producing some of his greatest and most famous works by living into his 90th year.  The controversial—to this day—Guggenheim Museum was still six months from completion when he died in 1959.  However, this biography, rather focusing solely on his work, goes into the considerable depth of his personal relationships, especially with women.  And surprisingly, it all begins in 1914, with the horrific murder of his mistress, Mamah Borthwick, her two children by her former husband, Edwin Cheney, and six of Wright’s student apprentices at his home and school, Taliesin, in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  In fact, the first two hundred pages of this book read more like a murder mystery than a biography, because of Hendrickson’s minute digging into the background and motivation—still shrouded in mystery even to this day—of the murderer, a Black man from Alabama, mistaken at the time as a refugee from the West Indies, who worked for Wright and his “family.”

This non-linear approach to biography proves to be as fascinating and challenging as the story itself, and even if you have read Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, you should still find this work to be enormously appealing.  It’s, as is often the case, the “story behind the story” that is most fascinating!