An autobiography

Description

This inspiring life-story by a towering figure of our era is an epic of genius in relation to the twentieth century. In these pages, Frank Lloyd Wright's personal revelations illumine an astonishing variety of experiences, opening with his life as a child with his Welsh forebears in the Midwest, his running away to plunge into the creative ferment of the Chicago of the Nineties, the beginning of one of the world's most productive careers, through his long dramatic life which culminated in his transforming influence on the modern world. His autobiography is a book of triumph over nearly incredible adversity. It is filled with memorable descriptions: of the young architect's apprentice with the pioneer Louis Sullivan; the fire which destroyed his renowned home, Taliesin, in the tragedy that took several lives, and his courageous re-building of his Imperial Hotel, in which he reveals why it rode out the disastrous 1923 earthquake in Tokyo, unharmed, while the city lay bout it in ruins; his romantic meeting with the woman whose devotion was to transform his life; the ordeals to which he and Olgivanna Lloyd Wright were early subjected and out of which they built a new life; the story of how they established the Taliesin Fellowship, the now renowned school of architecture to which students come from every part of the world; his friendships with Carl Sandburg, Alexander Woollcott, Lloyd Lewis, Ferdinand Schevill, among his others; his journeys to Japan and Russia; his creation of building after building-low cost houses, skyscrapers, churches, celebrated dwellings such as Hollyhock House, La Miniatura, Fallingwater, the Jacobs House (cost $5,500, including the architect's fee in 1936), etc.-which revolutionized the architecture of our century. During what he called "a very bad time in my life" Mrs. Wright urged him to begin work on his life-story and encouraged him through the years to complete it; and it is to her that he dedicated this final, definitive edition. Shortly after the preceding version of his autobiography appeared thirty-five years ago, Frank Lloyd Wright began to revise it, adding material over a period of sixteen years. This is the first edition of the corrected manuscript. Besides all his revisions of the earlier (and unillustrated) version, this new edition includes eighty-two illustrations, photographs of his family and of the people involved in his life, as well as his architectural masterpieces produced over a span of seventy years (including houses built as recently as 1976). This volume consists of six books, of which Book Six, titled BROADACRE CITY, comprises one of the most important additions to this comprehensive edition: the master's concepts of the future city and government-a major presentation of his ideas, prophecies being increasingly borne out in our time and destined to have an enduring influence in the future. Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography is an incomparable book, a frankly revealing and uncompromising personal achievement to stand with his great buildings.

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