Many Masks - by Brendan Gill (Paperback)

About the Book

A "sensitive yet revealingly iconoclastic" ("Kirkus") biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. "Informative, entertaining, gosspiy, contentious, affectionate, irreverent and, ultimately, reverential".--"Washington Post Book World". 300 illustrations.

Book 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 Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.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 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.