Many Masks: A Life Of Frank Lloyd Wright - Softcover

Gill, Brendan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306808722 ISBN 13: 9780306808722

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 1998

Synopsis

"Genius, egotist, mythomaniac, sexual rebel, master of media manipulation, the legendary Wright comes alive in all his cantankerous complexity. . . . A delight from cover to cover."--Kirkus

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is often described as the greatest of American architects. His works-among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum--earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.
"A synergistic event of first importance in terms of delight and humor and wonder: a graceful and shrewd writer, intoxicated all his life by the most intrusive and permanent of the arts, has unfrozen with words the music of the architecture, both sweet and sour, of the American genius Frank Lloyd Wright."--Kurt Vonnegut

About this title

About the Author:

Brendan Gill (1914-1997) was a staff writer for the New Yorker for over sixty years. He was the author of over twenty books, including his memoir, Here at the New Yorker (also available from Da Capo Press), three works of fiction, and biographies of Cole Porter, Tallulah Bankhead, and Charles Lindbergh.

From Publishers Weekly:

With a talent for public relations and a habit of neglecting to mention his sources, Wright portrayed himself as a revolutionary genius. But his recklessly entangled lifewives, mistresses, chronic debt, scandalscontinually threatened to paralyze his talent. At a time when the architectural profession in the U.S. was booming, he was granted comparatively few commissions and had to turn to lecturing to earn a meager living. Gill, architectural critic for the New Yorker, was friends with Wright and his third wife. Debunking yet sympathetic, this engrossing biography is a masterpiece of sleuthing and interpretive skill; it separates the man from the self-made myths. Wright portrays himself as innocent hero-victim of a corrupt society, but here we see an artful dodger molded by a boyhood filled with shame and anguish. Gill evaluates which of Wright's projects failed by the architect's own standards, and which ones succeeded. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to the New Yorker. (November
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0306808722
• ISBN 13: 9780306808722
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544