Frank LLoyd Wright: A Biography. - book reviews

National Review, Feb 1, 1993 by Terry Teachout

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography, by Meryle Secrest (Knopf, 634 pp., $30)

CONTRARY TO popular belief, Howard Roark wasn't really Frank Lloyd Wright, even though Ayn Rand idolized Wright and once tried to get him to build her a house. In fact, America's greatest architect had more in common with a very different artist: Richard Wagner. Like Wagner, Wright was an arrogant womanizer who thought the world owed him a living. Both men freely disregarded the practical in their attempts to touch the infinite. (One client called to complain that the flat roof of his Wright-designed house was leaking onto his desk. "Richard," Wright replied, "why don't you move your desk?") Both were geniuses, also. Meryle Secrest leaves no doubt of that in her immensely readable new biography. It would have taken a James or a Balzac to create a fictional egotist as monstrous as Wright, who habitually talked like this: "All the sheer wisdom of science, the cunning of politics, and the prayers of religion can but stand and wait for the revelation; awaiting the artist's conventionalization of life principle that shall make our social living beautiful, organically true." More than most biographies, this one reminds the reader that geniuses are as a rule are best appreciated at a distance.