“This is a biography worthy of the complexity of America’s iconic 20th Century architect. It describes Wright’s facade and flaws, but then reaches down to the deep emotional underpinnings of his brilliant but at times difficult personality. By understanding the turmoil of his life, Hendrickson makes Wright more sympathetic.”—Walter Isaacson, author of “Leonardo Da Vinci”

Paul Hendrickson discusses “Plagued By Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright.” A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

Presented in partnership with The Frank Lloyd Wright Trust

At the Frederick C. Robie House / 5757 S Woodlawn Ave. (Enter on Woodlawn Ave.)

Space is limited. Register here: https://bit.ly/2klgsPx

About the book: From the award-winning and nationally best-selling author of “Hemingway’s Boat” and “Sons of Mississippi”––an illuminating, pathbreaking biography that will change the way we understand the life, mind, and work of the premier American architect.

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 Tulsa Race Riot 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. 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.

About the author: Paul Hendrickson is the author of the New York Times best seller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost,” and “Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy,” which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. For two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. Among his other books are “Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott” (1992 finalist for the NBCC award) and “The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War” (1996 finalist for the National Book Award). 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. In 2009 he was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the father of two grown sons, both of whom work in media, and he lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, in Washington, D.C., and outside Philadelphia.

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