In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright stated that since boyhood one of his chief pleasures had been “omnivorous reading.”1 Wright did indeed have an unusual attraction to books—not only books on architecture and other arts, but novels, plays, poetry, and works on history, philosophy, social and political thought, economics, and other subjects. In a letter of 1901 to a friend who had lent him a novel by Johann Paul Richter, he described the intense feelings the book had aroused in him:
I have read him … and have read him again. I began by indulging him … charmed and sunned by his genial humor … but there came a grumble on page 260 … like the ominous hush before the coming storm, and solemnly deep down, he begins, and gathering wrath and force and power he goes on building up grandly until with a terribly comprehensive reach, he crashes...
University of California Press