Frank Lloyd Wright

Meryle Secrest

Jul 2014 · Sold by Knopf

About this eBook

The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson (“A triumph”—Washington Post; “A perfect riot”—Michael Holroyd; “Astonishing”—London Sunday Times) and of Kenneth Clark (“Splendid, enthralling”—The Wall Street Journal) 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 the twentieth-century American culture, society and politics.
            Meryle Secrest is the first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Her life of the architect, more than five years’ work and illustrated with 121 photographs, is a stunning feat of biographical narrative, sustained analysis and compassionate insight. With her extraordinary grasp of the man and his art, she gives us Frank Lloyd Wright close up—a creature of boundless energy and indomitable appetite for experience, a man whose limitless belief in his own rightness carried him through bankruptcy, arrest, fire, divorce, and years of social ostracism. A riveting portrait of a genius.

About the author

MERYLE SECREST was born and educated in Bath, England, and now lives in Washington, D.C. She is the author of nine biographies and is the recipient of the 2006 National Humanities Medal.