Part 1

Frank Lloyd Wright
by Ada Louise Huxtable

(Page 2 of 4)

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.

There is even some ambiguity about his name. Family records indicate that he was christened Frank Lincoln Wright when he was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867, although the family name Lloyd seems to have been quickly substituted. Lincoln was one of the most popular names in America at the time, and his mother's family, the Lloyd Joneses, who had come to Wisconsin in search of land and religious freedom as part of the Welsh emigration of the 1840s, were pro-Union and antislavery, like most of the Welsh community. It is not at all unlikely that he bore the name Lincoln briefly in honor of the Civil War president. Frank was one of three children born to Anna Lloyd Wright and William Russell Cary Wright, a widower who brought three children of his own to a troubled marriage that ended in divorce in 1885. Wright's younger sisters, Jane (later known as Jennie) and Maginel (Margaret Ellen, who became Maggie Nell and then Maginel), arrived before Anna denied William her conjugal and domestic services to focus solely on her son, whom she believed to be destined for greatness. From the provision of the right prenatal influences to lifelong support and sacrifice, she dedicated herself to seeing that he achieved it.

The marriage, in 1866, was a late and probably desperate one for Anna, one of ten children born to Richard Lloyd Jones and Mary (Mallie) Thomas Lloyd Jones, who left Wales in 1844 for the promise of cheap, abundant farmland in the American Middle West. Anna was in her midtwenties when she met William, and a thirtieth birthday was not far off, after which she would have been consigned to the common nineteenth-century role of spinster teacher for the rest of her life. Teaching was one of the very few respectable ways a woman could earn a living, and she had been traveling to various Wisconsin communities, riding horseback to country schools, remembered for her abundant dark hair and the brass-buttoned military coat she wore in bad weather. We are told that she was tall and walked freely, like a man.

If Anna needed to marry, William Wright needed a caretaker for his motherless children. A handsome, agreeable man of slight build, with fine, delicate features, he was a gifted musician, orator, and sometime preacher who had been admitted to the bar in 1857. He was warmly received wherever he went, and he moved often. He seems to have left the law to preach at a series of Baptist churches, where he quickly assumed an active social and political role in the community. The local newspaper invariably lauded his talents and social skills, and expressed sincere regret when he departed. The Lloyd Joneses revered education, and William must have appealed to Anna as a man knowledgeable in music, literature, and the law. He was shorter than his wife, who came from a family of tall, physically impressive, abundantly bearded, deeply religious, hardworking farmers and preachers, but what he lacked in stature he made up in erudition and charm.

After making his peripatetic way from New England in 1859, William had settled in Wisconsin with his first wife, Permelia, who died shortly after giving birth to their third child. Anna was teaching school in the area and boarding with the family at the time; the death of William's first wife evidently opened the door to romance, or at least to opportunity. The marriage was to take Anna and a household that grew to six children to New England and back again through a series of failed ambitions and doomed pastorates - McGregor, Iowa, in 1869, Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1871, and Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1874, and back to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1877. It did not help the marriage that the 1870s was a time of deep national depression, which meant the pastor was often unpaid. But with all of his talents, William was apparently unable to make a living; he could neither earn nor handle money. Frank recalled a house often without cash or food, where parishioners of whatever apparently bankrupt church William currently headed would hold "donation parties" that yielded pathetically little. He claimed to remember one that left nothing but twenty-nine pumpkin pies. Each congregation would beg William not to go, and the next place would prove no better.

The return to Wisconsin was probably encouraged and helped by Anna's family, now comfortably established on profitable small farms around Hillside and Spring Green, on the Wisconsin River. Anna rejoined the tight-knit family of the Uncles and the Aunts, as they were known, who would make up the young Wright's world. Life had made the Uncles cautious, practical men. The family's slow, hard journey from Wales to the Middle West had been marked by poverty, hunger, and tragedy, interrupted and delayed by the need to work along the way. One young child fell ill and died en route and had to be buried along the roadside in an unknown grave. Those stern, industrious Welshmen must have found William's misfortunes hard to excuse or to bear. After the family's return from Weymouth, Uncle James drove his wagon the forty miles from his farm to the Wright house in Madison, with a cow tied behind, "so Anna's children could have good fresh milk." Turning to the faith of the Lloyd Joneses, Unitarianism, William received an appointment to a Unitarian church, but the position proved no more successful than the others. In today's critical assessment, and no doubt in the minds of the Uncles, William was a loser, and Anna would be better off without him.

The marriage lasted about seven more stress-filled years, worsening as William retreated into despair. "Failure after failure added to failure," Wright wrote in his Autobiography, led to an "inveterate and desperate withdrawal...into the arid life of his studies, his books, and his music, where he was oblivious of all else." The retreat no doubt also served as a refuge from his alienated wife, who was neither patient nor long suffering as she saw her dreams disappear. Frank was eighteen when the break finally took place. The conventional wisdom and the Wright mythology, supported by Wright's own account, have maintained that William abandoned Anna. The court records of the divorce, found in Madison by historian Thomas S. Hines and published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History in 1967, the centenary of Wright's birth, tell a different story. When the Lloyd Joneses realized that the marriage could not be salvaged, they offered to support Anna and the children if William would leave. Hardly in a position to argue, he agreed to give Anna the house and furnishings and go away; he may even have been secretly relieved.

These proceedings yield Wright's real birth date, which is confirmed by census records and high school documents, and a sad and sordid account of domestic discord. Court documents reveal that it was William who instigated divorce proceedings against Anna, detailing years of what he described as spousal abuse. It was William who claimed to be the deserted partner. Not only had Anna refused to share his bed - "for two years she has protested against and refused me intercourse as between husband and wife" - but she also "wanted more money than I could furnish." In any discussion of their desperate finances she would become "violently angry," and if the beleaguered William objected to her extravagance (although one wonders, under the circumstances, how extravagant she could be), "she would resent any questions about economy." Other wifely duties were withheld. "A large part of my mending I did myself or carried away because when I requested her to do anything it was often neglected...[or] when it was done, often threwn [sic] in my face or on the floor....She told me 'I hate the very ground you walk on.'" With Anna's admission "that she had no love for her husband," the court concluded that "all of the allegations of the complaint are true." It would have been an extraordinary ploy for William to invent these demeaning hardships in order to be free.

Clearly, Anna made her husband miserable and behaved abominably. But even a kinder, more understanding woman would have been driven to exhaustion and desperation by the unstable household, the constant lack of resources, the unrelieved poverty and anxiety that she could see ahead of her for the rest of her life. Anna was an educated, ambitious woman, with literary and cultural aspirations far above domestic drudgery. She had been trapped in the domestic trivia of raising six children with endless mind-numbing and backbreaking work, without any compensating comfort or security, in abject and constant need. Charm, music, and fine oratory were not enough. She obviously hated her life; stressed beyond endurance, she frequently lost control. William's mending must have been the last straw in a day of escalating chores. Although her actions speak to something cold, and even cruel, in her nature, she was clearly bitterly disappointed in her marriage and unwilling to add more children to the brood. When move after move failed to improve their condition, even hope seemed futile. What was really inexcusable - beyond the violence, or the way she treated her husband and the children - was her championship of her children against his from his first marriage, and her single-minded devotion to her son. From the time he was conceived, she made up her mind that he would be an architect. She hung the right pictures, played the right music, and thought the right thoughts to influence the unborn child. He would deliver her from the despair and hardship of her life, make up for her thwarted ambitions; they would have a golden future together.

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Ada Louise Huxtable is a Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic. She is the author of several books, including Inventing Reality, Pier Luigi Nervi, and, most recently, The Unreal American. A MacArthur fellow, Huxtable is the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal and was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982.