Through letters, memoirs, contemporary documents, and a stunning assemblage of photographs - many of which have never before been published - author Ron McCrea tells the fascinating story of the building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin, which would be the architect's principal residence for the rest of his life. Photos taken by Wright's associates show rare views of Taliesin under construction and illustrate Wright's own recollections of the first summer there and the craftsmen who worked...

The life and architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) have been much-studied, yet there is a consistent division between analyses of his architecture, which exclude any discussion of his daily life, and books that tell the often sensational tale of his life, with barely a passing reference to the buildings themselves. The result is that, despite the large number of volumes on Wright, the most essential part of his life – his life as an architect, working, as he said, ‘in the cause of...

A powerhouse of architectural biography by Pulitzer Prize winning critic Ada Louise Huxtable of America's greatest architectRenowned architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable's biography Frank Lloyd Wright looks at the architect and the man, from his tumultuous personal life to his long career as a master builder. Along the way she introduces Wright's masterpieces, from the tranquil Fallingwater to Taliesin, rebuilt after tragedy and murder-not only explorin...

Most poets are or have been at one time or another members of what Mark Strand here calls “The Midnight Club”: they are insomniacs, or feel most productive in the middle of the night, or, if nothing else, are people whose work requires an openness to the dreams, visions, and scraps of inspired language that may drift across our path in the wee hours. In this selection, drawn from Knopf’s Poem-a-Day program (the daily e-mails we’ve sent to our fans every April for the last dozen years or mo...

Fallingwater Rising is a biography not of a person but of the most famous house of the twentieth century. Scholars and the public have long extolled the house that Frank Lloyd Wright perched over a Pennsylvania waterfall in 1937, but the full story has never been told.When he got the commission to design the house, Wright was nearing seventy, his youth and his early fame long gone. It was the Depression, and Wright had no work in sight. Into his orbit stepped Edgar J. Kauf...

**Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction“The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times**James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his er...

A "compelling" biography of the brilliant abstract expressionist painter who was far more than just Mrs. Jackson Pollock ( Los Angeles Times).Lee Krasner is best known as the artist-wife of Jackson Pollock, the renowned abstract expressionist painter. Yet in this riveting biography, the first full-length account of her colorful life, Krasner emerges as a significant artist who deserves her place in the twentieth century's cultural lexicon.In this cap...

A love for reading is one of the most precious gifts that we can give children. It nurtures their imagination and creativity, lets them explore other worlds, and opens their minds to new truths and knowledge in appealing, inspiring ways. But how can we sort through thousands of children's books to discover the really worthwhile ones? Elizabeth Wilson offers us a newly revised, comprehensive guide to the very best in children's literature. Just as in the original volume, she comments on the t...

Frank Lloyd Wright was renowned during his life not only as an architectural genius but also as a subject of controversy—from his radical design innovations to his turbulent private life, including a notorious mass murder that occurred at his Wisconsin estate, Taliesin, in 1914. But the estate also gave rise to one of the most fascinating and provocative experiments in American cultural history: the Taliesin Fellowship, an extraordinary architectural colony where Wright trained hundreds of...

This contains 250 anecdotes, including these: 1) Political cartoonist Thomas Nast was also famous for his drawings of Christmas and of Santa Claus, and he was responsible for many of the ideas we associate with Santa Claus—the red and white suit of clothing, the workshop at the North Pole, and the reading by Santa Claus of letters sent to him by children. In a drawing titled 'Christmas Flirtation,' Mr. Nast drew Julia, his daughter, standing under some mistletoe. In England, boys followed ...

Although an American, Mary Cassatt spent the majority of her life in France and gained most of her fame and success in Europe. Not until after her death on June 14, 1926, at Chateau de Beaufresne, near Paris, did she become a truly celebrated American artist. Cassatt is known most for her paintings and pastels of mothers and their children. Never having been a mother herself, perhaps Cassatt was mesmerized by the familial bond so evident to observers of these unique relationships and in pa...