From the award-winning and best-selling author of Hemingway's Boat and Sons of Mississippi - an illuminating, path-breaking biography that will change the way we understand the life, mind, and work of the premier American architect.
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.
A masterful portrait of the flawed creator of flawless
buildings
*Simon Jenkins*
Paul Hendrickson has a voice. He hasn't written a line that lies
flat on the page; his every sentence crinkles and burns with
intelligence. In Plagued by Fire, he transmutes the story of
America's greatest architect into something unexpected and
immediate—a life inscribed by race, fire, murder, and loss, all
inseparable from creative brilliance. Like Hendrickson himself,
this book is indispensable
*T. J. Stiles, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize*
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*
A first-rate reporter and storyteller, Hendrickson not only
explains Wright's architecture in terms any layman can appreciate,
but also connects that monolithic achievement with a living,
breathing human being—an egomaniac and huckster, yes, but also a
haunted, touching man who never, never gave up. Quite simply, you
don't know the whole story until you read this book
*Blake Bailey, author of Cheever: A Life*
Paul Hendrickson has made a life of taking the figures we think we
know, and revealing how little we actually understood them…
Hendrickson has his work cut out for him with Wright, certainly the
most written about architect in the world. Yet this, his longest
book might be his most beautifully written – there’s a tone of
absolute curiosity and respect, a judiciousness about probing a
long-dead psyche, and a depth of understanding about how hidden
demons often contribute to the art that artists make which [makes]
this book absolutely riveting, as if all the buildings it describes
have yet to be built
*Literary Hub*
Astonishingly artful and perceptive... There are very few
biographers today writing at Hendrickson’s level. No one will walk
away from this book without a deepened and transformed view of
Wright’s life and times
*Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin*
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's beautifully composed, revelatory Plagued by Fire
brilliantly combs through the tangled web Frank Lloyd Wright wove
around his long-lived, complicated self. Written as if it's a
detective story, which in a way it is, this wonderfully
unconventional biography captures Wright's artistry while it plumbs
the depths of his vulnerability, his compulsions, his work ethic,
his cruelties, his defensiveness—and his humanity. What emerges is
biography on a grand scale, large enough to encompass the restless,
haunted architect who lived, breathed, and was burned by the
twentieth century. Not to be missed
*Brenda Wineapple, author of The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew
Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation*
Paul Hendrickson’s new biographical study...is a brave attempt to
do something different… the contradictory Wright who emerges, both
hateful and human, is probably the truest portrait of the man we
have yet
*Evening Standard, *Book of the Week**
[Wright] shines out in all his maddening contradictions and
vanities. Hendrickson has a very sharp ear for the tone of Wright’s
diary entries, and an equally sharp eye for the subtleties of
expression in a family photo…he teases significances from them…
[Plagued by Fire is] painstakingly researched…[and a] moving
book
*Daily Telegraph*
Plagued by Fire yields its information piecemeal, like a suspense
novel. Through a blizzard of details and speculation on the part of
the biographer, who forges ahead, behind, back and forth in time
with the zeal of a forensic bloodhound, an intimate portrait of
Frank Lloyd Wright gradually materializes, as a pointillist
portrait comes into focus a little distance
*Times Literary Supplement*
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