Hendrickson employs tremendously rigorous research to interrogate the myths that hang around his larger-than-life subject. His is not an effort to exonerate (or make excuses for the bad behavior of yet another white male artist!) but to dig deeply into who Frank Lloyd Wright really was ... This thick volume is not meant to serve as an introduction to Wright or his artistic trajectory...That is not to say that it doesn’t cover Wright’s notable projects or his notions about 'organic architecture' with a great deal of attention and care. If anything, the author overdoes it, parsing too many chronologies and splitting too many hairs with previous Wright biographers ... But Hendrickson’s persistent and expansive curiosity also takes readers beyond Wright in important, revelatory ways ... Passing through [Wright's] darknesses makes you see his buildings, and all that flow, beauty and light, in a new way.

An eccentric synthesis of biography and autobiography, rife with speculation, rumours, myth-shattering and myth-making, sensationalized accounts of Wright’s personal life and highly detailed scrutiny of individuals only peripherally connected with Wright, Plagued by Fire: The dreams and furies of Frank Lloyd Wright takes for granted that the reader is already informed, from biographies by Grant Carpenter Manson, Meryle Secrest, Robert Twombly, Ada Huxtable, Neil Levine and Brendan Gill, among others, of the basic facts of the life of the greatest, and most controversial, of American architects ... Plagued by Fire yields its information piecemeal, like a suspense novel. Through a blizzard of details and speculation on the part of the biographer, who forges ahead, behind, back and forth in time with the zeal of a forensic bloodhound, an intimate portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright gradually materializes, as a pointillist portrait comes into focus at a little distance ... more offensive is the biographer’s protracted, pruriently detailed account of the murders at Spring Green, even as he chides the tabloids for their salaciousness ... Equally jarring is Hendrickson’s aggressive intimacy with the reader ... It is as if the frustrated biographer of Geoff Dyer’s darkly hilarious Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence and the obsessed pseudo-scholar Charles Kinbote of Nabokov’s Pale Fire have collaborated on a work of vaulting ambition, too vast to comprehend, dazzling and elusive, near-unreadable.

About Wright’s architecture, Hendrickson offers little insight, none of it original. His mission, rather, is to re-evaluate Wright as a person. Hendrickson, who unabashedly inserts himself with poetically construed dear reader whispers into his narrative, confesses that his is a hunt for Wright’s 'humanity' ... Let’s get one thing straight. Wright was a cad. Even fervent champions of his architecture acknowledge that. Prudently, Hendrickson concedes the point ... Hendrickson wishes to establish Wright’s 'fundamental decency as a person.' He tilts at this windmill with formidable energy and considerable literary imagination, with an earnestness at once lavish and puzzling ... So: Wright suffered tragedies, felt affection and felt pain, and treated a few people decently. Ergo, he was a man of deep humanity. That’s Hendrickson’s position. Not enough to revolutionize, not enough even to alter, our understanding of the man ... In florid prose, Hendrickson recounts countless episodes tangential to Wright’s life or work, meandering onto all manner of occasionally interesting terrain ... would be simply forgettable if Hendrickson weren’t perpetuating a romantic mythology of artistic genius that is at once tiresome, simplistic, long past its expiration date and wrong. Wright was an imaginative innovator and occasionally an excellent architect, but that doesn’t transform a scoundrel into a tortured genius, let alone a sympathetic character ... In the end, what matters is not the life but the work: its vision, its execution, its lessons, its relevance to the way we do and might live. But none of that is Paul Hendrickson’s concern.

... in [Hendrickson's] hands Wright’s life emerges with new clarity as a Shakespearean-scale drama—beginning as Hamlet, ending as Lear ... a vast, sweeping book, one that, along the way, corrects some of the canards told by Wright himself ... As fine as Mr. Hendrickson is on the buildings, the book truly soars when he returns to the fire that haunted Wright ... Mr. Hendrickson makes it impossible to leave this book without a bigger thought about structures and the dramas that play out within them: that creating a building can be an act of love but also of risk—more for some than for others.

Hendrickson takes an oft-told story and turns it into a braid of multiple narratives that portrays Wright’s family, lovers, clients, and enemies, all charmed and cursed by the spell of an extraordinarily gifted man ... Hendrickson is a researcher of unquenchable curiosity. He peels away layers of myth from the lives of Wright’s wives and lovers ... Hendrickson’s attention to detail and Faulknerian storytelling require a dedicated reader, notably when he revisits the murders in lurid detail in the prologue. Some long digressions lead to dead ends, but as Hendrickson travels the arc of Wright’s life, his investigation into its deepest mysteries achieves a powerful momentum. Wright was a genius, an egotist, and a man tormented by conscience and regret, and Henderson’s inspired storytelling is worthy of its subject.

Aren’t we contending with enough high-profile narcissism these days? But readers of this biography will begin to see these things as only part of a complex self. As he did in his last book, Hendrickson employs tremendously rigorous research to interrogate the myths that hang around his larger-than-life subject. His is not an effort to exonerate but to dig deeply into who Wright really was ... This thick volume is not meant to serve as an introduction to Wright or his artistic trajectory. That is not to say that it doesn’t cover Wright’s notable projects or his notions about 'organic architecture' with a great deal of attention and care. If anything, the author overdoes it, parsing too many chronologies and splitting too many hairs with previous biographers ... But Hendrickson’s persistent and expansive curiosity also takes readers beyond Wright in important, revelatory ways. A lot of effort here goes into learning about Wright’s family members, clients and even Carlton. And so Wright’s narrative becomes part of a larger story that also involves the Great Migration, the horror of the Tulsa Race Riot, the legacy of the Transcendentalists, the tradition of the New England pulpit and the beginning of suburban sprawl. What this suggests: No American life isn’t bound up with our larger cultural history.

This extraordinary book is a not a traditional biography of the arrogant, narcissistic, egotistic genius architect Wright, but rather, as Hendrickson writes, 'a kind of synecdoche, with selected pockets in a life standing for the oceanic whole of that life.' Resisting the myths and hagiography of Wright, Hendrickson wears his encyclopedic knowledge of the architect’s creations lightly and evokes the emotional and psychological life of this gifted man who was cursed by regret and remorse stemming from tragic, racially charged conflagrations in his life ... Hendrickson is distinguished by his brilliant ability to find just the right angles on each of his disparate subjects, with multiple perspectives inspiring a whole new way of seeing an American icon.

A biographer’s instinct, faced with such Sturm und Drang, might be to tone things down a bit, lower the volume, cut through the melodrama in search of the human contours. Well aware of Wright’s reputation for selfishness and megalomania, Hendrickson does note occasional pockets of humanity ... For the most part, however, Hendrickson amplifies the melodrama in the Wright story, and wallows in it ... Hendrickson has written less a conventional biography than a gothic tracery, beholden to Poe and Faulkner and the feverish (and repeatedly invoked) prose of James Agee, stitching together what he calls 'the dreams and furies' of his subject. Readers interested in a more straightforward treatment might consult Meryle Secrest’s much-admired 1992 biography ... Hendrickson, by contrast, races through the major phases of Wright’s career, dismissing these summarizing sections as mere 'connective tissue,' and looping back to events he’s previously covered in detail. This distracting approach is unfortunate, since Hendrickson, with no expertise in architecture, is particularly skilled in evoking the feel of a building ... Instead of pursuing the central question—surely the only mystery that really counts—of precisely how Wright, the Midwestern hayseed and congenital liar, achieved such enduring miracles, Hendrickson pursues, at obsessive length, mysteries that seem at best peripheral, and perhaps entirely irrelevant, to what the master accomplished. Thirty overwritten pages are devoted to the background of the man who committed the murders at Taliesin ... Whole sections of Plagued by Fire feel cantilevered, one extreme supposition extending out from another ... Amid all this gothic turmoil, which takes us very far from Wright’s true achievement, one can’t help wondering if there might be a more direct way—more Bach than Wagner—to make some sense of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work.

... a curiously obsessive quality, returning again and again not just to the events of 1914 but to other fires that bedeviled Wright’s career. Hendrickson is a dogged researcher and pursues every lead ... a curious and at times exhausting book. Few subjects in American architecture have been more thoroughly studied than Wright ... Hendrickson’s efforts to turn new ground are sporadically successful. He writes sensitively about Wright’s emotional life ... At the bottom of all of this is a Gothic sense of almost supernatural threads tying the architect’s personal life to larger, more sinister forces of history...Sometimes, however, the author’s tangents are merely tangential, and he often finishes following a dead end with a cavalier dismissal...These dead ends pile up, as does the minutiae about clients and the children of clients...This is maddening after a while. So too the prose style, which is what journalists would call 'muscular,' teeming with sentence fragments, sentences without verbs, forced colloquialisms, and a tendency to throw out a statement and then retract it, as if we’re following the author as he improvises his text. Also, he likes to throw in 'damn' as an all-purpose intensifier ... At some point, the author’s deft use of local color becomes merely clutter, and the reader wishes a 600-page book had been trimmed to about 300. If one cut the speculation and digressions, that could probably be reduced to about 150 pages. But at their best, those pages are, well, damn good.

Hendrickson’s proclivities are for the baroque. This is the most mannered book you are likely to read: self-referential, full of what-a-clever-boy-am-I writing, spattered with show-off phrase-making, and achingly self-aware ... He has a weakness for cod psychology, conjuring a gay liaison between Wright a fellow architect, Cecil Corwin, on the strength of a few purple phases in Wright’s letters; he makes an extended and daft link between Carlton’s atrocity and the Tulsa race riot of 1921; and his main addition to Wright scholarship is discovering that the architect’s father left his mother, suing her for unreasonable behaviour and violence, rather than the other way round, as Wright had always insisted ... Hendrickson’s curlicues are, however, really an act of homage. He sees each event in Wright’s life as momentous, even though every existence, however exalted, has its longueurs and banalities. What his overheated treatment does press home is just how remarkable the architect was.

... a whopper at nearly 600 pages, is a brave attempt to do something different ... sounds risky but we’re in safe hands ... This book will not be everybody’s cup of tea. The writing is baroque, much of it in the first person, as Hendrickson chases down the architect and his hauntings, many of them involving fire and grisly deaths. But the contradictory Wright who emerges, both hateful and human, is probably the truest portrait of the man we have yet.

...reads more like research notes…. extensive research notes… hundreds of pages of research notes. The author spends an enormous amount of time and words telling the reader all about the inaccuracies of other published works on FLW. It lost my interest and I found myself wishing that he would get onto the things that he found to be true about FLW and telling them in a reasonably succinct and interesting way ... you are looking to dive really deep into the details of what’s been written about FLW and contrasting it with what this author has found to be true, you may enjoy this book. To me, this one reads more like a compilation of research notes that haven’t yet been woven into a story for others to enjoy.

This book is bizarre ... Hendrickson, whose research seems to be Herculean, constantly corrects the mistakes of earlier biographers ... This book is not the place to begin if you want to know more. It is egregiously over-written with silly authorial interpolations ... Furthermore, it is perhaps 200 pages too long, because the author persists in drowning us in pointless paragraphs and unnecessary detail about marginal characters or incidents. This is detail masquerading as depth, a common fault in certain types of American journalism.

Conflagrations physical and emotional illuminate America’s greatest architect in this melodramatic biography ... lurid, repetitive ... The haphazard narrative also explores Wright’s stormy relationship with his second wife, his possibly homosexual relationship with another architect, his misrepresentation of his parents’ marital troubles, and violent deaths among owners of Wright-designed houses. Hendrickson’s novelistic treatment meticulously researches facts but wildly overinterprets them; he is forever reading subtext into stray remarks and scanning family photographs for signs of inner psychology. His appreciations of Wright’s architecture are insightful and evocative, but readers seeking a systematic, judicious Wright bio should look elsewhere.