CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Mass Murderer at Taliesen

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gordon House, Silverton, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Midwesterner, architect, iconoclast. A new nonfiction book, The Killer and Frank Lloyd Wright, by seasoned true crime writer Casey Sherman (“Helltown”, “A Murder in Hollywood”, “Blood in the Water”) takes readers back over 125 years to the exploits of Frank Lloyd Wright, American original.

Sherman sets the action in two principal locations: Chicago and its leafy suburb of Oak Park, and the idyllic small town of Spring Green, Wisconsin, where Wright had family background/ ties. Timelines for Wright and his married lover, Mamah (pronounced MAY-mah) Borthwick Cheney, follow quickly after initial chapters on his formative years, brief college days, and early adulthood/first marriage after he puts down roots in Chicago. Remarkably, at age 19, Wright worked as a draftsman for established architects Lyman Silsbee, and later, Louis Sullivan.

When Wright meets Mamah, both had spouses and families, yet this did not deter him from leaving his wife (Catherine, known as Kitty) and children to run away to Europe, to Japan, and back to his beloved........

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