Saturday, October 5, 2013

the last book I ever read (Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life by Ada Louise Huxtable, excerpt one)



from Frank Lloyd Wright (Penguin Lives) by Ada Louise Huxtable:

The life starts with a lie: a changed birth date, from 1867 to 1869, the sort of small, white vanity lie usually embraced by women but common also among men. Like most age changes, it was done later in life. Two years hardly seem worth the trouble for all the chronological complications such things cause. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s case, it had the desired effect—it made a case for a precocious talent with an impressively youthful, early success in Chicago in the 1890s, and it kept him shy of the dreaded 90-mark during his brilliant late work in the 1950s. Wright was just two months away from his ninety-second birthday when he died in April 1959, a fact successfully evaded by this small subterfuge. If no one was the wiser, the true date was easy enough to find, once scholars tried. The change did no harm to anyone, although it annoyed his sister Jane all during her lifetime, since it was her birth year that Wright usurped.



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