Loving Frank - Softcover

Horan, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 2283023955 ISBN 13: 9782283023952

Publisher: BUCHET CHASTEL, 2009

Synopsis

540pages. 20x14x4cm. Broché.

About this title

Review:

Loving Frank is one of those novels that takes over your life. It's mesmerizing and fascinating filled with complex characters, deep passions, tactile descriptions of astonishing architecture, and the colorful immediacy of daily life a hundred years ago all gathered into a story that unfolds with riveting urgency. (Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light)

This graceful, assured first novel . . . is engrossing, provocative reading. (Scott Turow)

A riveting historical novel. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Horan does an impressive job of rescuing Mamah from the footnotes of history . . . This compelling read sheds light on an ill-fated relationship from the foundations up (Independent)

Outstanding... Nancy Horan has found an untold tale of a famous couple that rocked society at the start of the last century, and she tells it with gut wrenching raw emotion that could not fail to stir even the hardest heart. (Daily Mail)

Enthralling (New York Times)

A novel of impressive scope and ambition (Washington Post)

From the Author:

Loving Frank is a work of fiction based on events relating to the love affair of a brilliant, controversial architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and one of his clients, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Mamah, along with her husband Edwin Cheney, commissioned Wright in 1903 to design a house for their family on East Avenue in Oak Park, Illinois. This book portrays the period 1907 to 1914, during which the Wright/Cheney affair flourished.

Anyone who lives in Oak Park, as I did for 24 years, quickly absorbs information about Frank Lloyd Wright. The village was a growing suburb of Chicago in 1889, when the architect designed a home for his wife Catherine, himself, and their family, which eventually grew to six children. In time, Oak Park became Wright's laboratory during his `prairie period', when he refined, with each new house he created, his evolving ideas about organic architecture. Today, especially in summer, Oak Park's streets are peopled with tourists from around the world who come to see the many houses he designed there and to experience firsthand the architect's legendary spaces. Wright is Oak Park's most famous citizen (Ernest Hemingway runs a close second), and his home and studio complex has been restored to its appearance as it was in 1909, the year the architect left town.

I don't remember when I first learned about Mamah Borthwick Cheney, but I recall vividly a long-ago tour I took of his home and studio, at the end of which someone asked, `Why did Wright leave in 1909?' While the name of Mamah Cheney was not included in the answer, the tour guide explained the awkward truth: the famous architect, who had celebrated in his buildings the values of family and home, had departed for Europe in 1909 with the wife of a client, never to reside permanently with his family again.

Eventually I learned that Mamah and Edwin Cheney's house was just a few blocks north of my own home on East Avenue. I had passed the house many times on my morning walks, unaware of its history. Upon learning a few facts about Mamah, I found myself pausing in front of the low-slung brick house, wanting to know more.

Very little information has been available about Wright's relationship with Mamah Cheney. The architect's biographers have lamented the lack of any remaining correspondence between the two. In the absence of personal papers belonging to Mamah, I pieced together what details of her life I could find in old newspapers, memoirs by Oak Parkers, census reports, histories of the places she lived, books on women's roles during the early part of the 20th century, and Wright's brief account of her in his autobiography, in which he chose to call her `faithful comrade' rather than to reveal her name. How thrilling it was, then, to discover two years into the project the existence of ten letters Mamah wrote to Ellen Key, the Swedish feminist for whom she translated. Here was Mamah's own voice! In a few sentences here and there Mamah Borthwick Cheney opened her heart and revealed her innermost feelings to the woman she'd chosen to be her mentor. The details provided by the correspondence helped me form a clearer picture of who she was and what her life was like during her affair with Wright.

About this edition

• Publisher: BUCHET CHASTEL
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 2283023955
• ISBN 13: 9782283023952
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 540