New Insights into Frank Lloyd Wright’s Troubled Life

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Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the 20th century’s greatest architects—an assertion with which Wright consistently agreed. Wright has been the subject of enough books to fill a wall of shelves. So why add to the library?

The title of Paul Hendrickson’s biography, Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, refers directly to a notorious incident: the 1914 ax-murder of his mistress, her two children and four other people by the architect’s black servant (who then set fire to the Taliesin crime scene). Wright’s Spring Green, Wis., home-studio caught fire again in the 1920s (“crossed wires” that time) and fire is a metaphor of Wright’s tempestuous life.

Wright seemed to consume everyone in his circle, but Hendrickson says wait: his narcissism had limits. The author suspects a kinder heart beneath that imperious persona than most observers have detected. He finds traces of shame and remorse amidst the landmarks and the hubris.

Hendrickson went further than anyone to investigate the black servant, Julian Carlton, tracking his family into the antebellum South (he was the child of slaves) and traveling the dusty roads of the remote Alabama county of his birth. Not unlike Wright, Carlton was a fabulist, spinning stories of Caribbean origins to enhance his status. In thoroughly surveying Carlton’s family tree, Hendrickson comes up against the limitations of history, not only the information gaps but the necessity of speculation. We will never know what motivated Carlton’s killing spree. He left no explanatory screed and died sullen, starving himself to death at the Dodgeville jail.

Plagued by Fire is an astute, even wise biography of an architect whose buildings are better understood than his life.

Paul Hendrickson will discuss Plagued by Fire at Boswell Book Co. on Monday, Oct. 21, at 7 p.m.