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  • Plagued by Fire

  • The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright
  • Written by: Paul Hendrickson
  • Narrated by: Arthur Morey
  • Length: 24 hrs and 49 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (2 ratings)

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Plagued by Fire

Written by: Paul Hendrickson
Narrated by: Arthur Morey
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Publisher's Summary

Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home. In showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright.
©2019 Paul Hendrickson (P)2019 Random House Audio
Art & Literature Architecture
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What the critics say

“Dazzling.... Ingenious.... Plagued by Fire has moments of raw emotional power.” (Amanda Hurley, The American Scholar)

“Hendrickson is one of our great stylists.” (Boston Globe)

“Paul Hendrickson has made a life of taking the figures we think we know, and revealing how little we actually understood them. From the depression-era photographer Marion Post Wolcott to the war-maker Robert McNamara and the writer Ernest Hemingway, his subjects tend to be complex, ambitious men and women caught in the thrust of outsized times. 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.” (John Freeman, Executive Editor, Literary Hub)

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Profile Image for Donald Macdonald

Deep dive into the mystery that is FLW

At first the length of this audiobook seemed daunting but the storytelling and the excellent narration was so compelling that the time seemed to fly by. An architect myself, I found that the building projects were treated intelligently with critiques from FLW's contemporaries, however I discovered that the exploration of the human side of this "honestly arrogant - not insincerely humble" man was absolutely fascinating. Paul Hendrickson sometimes tests the reader with lengthy tangential stories of his subject's family, friends, employees and clients, yet we end up grateful for knowing more of the rich historical context of the life and times of "America's Greatest Architect". Not incidentally some mistruths and stereotypes are corrected in the telling. I could tell that Hendrickson, through his exhaustive research, grew to love this flawed egotistical yet singularly talented architect who rose time and again from the ashes of the many fires that plagued him throughout his long and legendary life.

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