Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders

Couverture
Terrace Books, 18 janv. 2007 - 218 pages
The most pivotal and yet least understood event of Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated life involves the brutal murders in 1914 of seven adults and children dear to the architect and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, his landmark residence, near Spring Green, Wisconsin. Unaccountably, the details of that shocking crime have been largely ignored by Wright’s legion of biographers—a historical and cultural gap that is finally addressed in William Drennan’s exhaustively researched Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders.
In response to the scandal generated by his open affair with the proto-feminist and free love advocate Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Wright had begun to build Taliesin as a refuge and "love cottage" for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others).
Conceived as the apotheosis of Wright’s prairie house style, the original Taliesin would stand in all its isolated glory for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull.
Supplying both a gripping mystery story and an authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, Drennan wades through the myths surrounding Wright and the massacre, casting fresh light on the formulation of Wright’s architectural ideology and the cataclysmic effects that the Taliesin murders exerted on the fabled architect and on his subsequent designs. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association
 

Table des matières

Acknowledgments
The House across the River
3
Prelude to Murder The Architect and the Feminist
5
Scandal in Oak Park
43
A Peculiar Establishment Life at Taliesin 19111914
69
A Summer Day That Changed the World Murder at Taliesin
85
I Guess You Solved the Question The Motives Trials and Lonesome Death of Julian Carlton
131
The Legacy of Fire
154
Notes
171
Selected Bibliography
207
Index
211
Droits d'auteur

Autres éditions - Tout afficher

Expressions et termes fréquents

À propos de l'auteur (2007)

William R. Drennan (1944–2015) was professor emeritus of English at the University of Wisconsin–Baraboo/Sauk County and adjunct instructor in the Department of English at Appalachian State University, in Boone, North Carolina.

Informations bibliographiques