The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family - Hardcover

Lessard, Suzannah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385314450 ISBN 13: 9780385314459

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1996

Synopsis

A former journalist describes the scandalous murder of her great-grandfather, architect Stanford White, reassessing the events and personalities involved in the case and providing an intensely personal account of her own quest for understanding of her emotional legacy. 35,000 first printing. First serial, The New Yorker.

About this title

About the Author:

Suzannah Lessard was a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harvard Design and The Washington Monthly, of which she is a founding editor. She has received the Whiting award, the Jenny Moore Fellowship at George Washington University, the Anthony Lukas Work-in-progress Award, and a Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars In Washington. She teaches in the MFA program at the New School, as well as in the low residency MFA program at Goucher College.

From the Inside Flap:

Stanford White--his scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"--has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century.
As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White'

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385314450
• ISBN 13: 9780385314459
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 334