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Authors read by Wright

Compiled by Paul V. Turner

Listed here are authors Wright said he read, in his publications or correspondence—or for which there is other evidence of his having read.  In some cases there is also evidence of the specific books Wright read.  Many of these authors and works are not represented in the various collections of Wright's surviving books.  Authors of books that are in these collections are not included here unless there is actual evidence that Wright read them; one should therefore also consult the "Database" section of the website to find additional authors and works.  The evidence that Wright read each of the authors listed here is summarized in the accompanying commentary, with references to the sources of the information.  For frequently cited sources, abbreviations are used (e.g., "CW" for Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings); clicking on the abbreviation will produce the list of full citations of the sources.

 

Adams, Henry
Speaking of writers who had influenced or impressed him, in A Testament (1957), Wright said, "While admiring Henry Hobson Richardson, I instinctively disliked his patron Henry Adams as our most accomplished (therefore most dangerous) promoter of eclecticism. I believed Adams, Boston Brahmin, would dislike Louis Sullivan and Walt Whitman. His frame of reference was never theirs, or mine" (Testament, p. 205).  Wright must have been thinking of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, Adams's only book that dealt with architecture or the visual arts. Wright apparently felt that the book's favorable portrayal of medieval architecture and culture promoted eclecticism. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres was printed privately in 1904, and then publicly in 1913.

Agache, Alfred
In 1931, after returning from a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Wright wrote to Eliel Saarinen, who had been with him on the trip, saying that he was sending him an “Agache big book.”  Saarinen replied that the book would inform him about “Beaux Arts city planning” (letter from Wright to Saarinen, 9 Dec. 1931; information from Margo Stipe, July 2018).  The book was probably a publication on the works of the French architect Alfred Agache, who designed a city plan for Rio.  I have not identified the specific book. Update, January 2022: Janet Parks has identified what is surely this book. Distrito Federal. Prefeitura, Cidade do Rio de Janeiro : extensão - remodelação - embellezamento / Organisações projectadas pela administração Antonio Prado junior, sob a disecção geral de Alfred Agache, Paris: Foyer brésilien, [1930].

Agard, Walter Raymond
In 1935 Wright wrote a highly critical review of Agard's book The New Architectural Sculpture.  The review was published in The State Journal (Spring Green, Wisconsin), 11 October 1935 (CW, vol. 3, pp. 181-82).

Allen, James L.
In Wright's own house in Oak Park, begun in 1889, an inscription above the inglenook fireplace reads, "Good friend, around these hearth-stones speak no evil word of any creature."  This aphorism is found, word-for-word, in the Kentucky author James Lane Allen's novel Aftermath, published first in 1895 (as part two of A Kentucky Cardinal).  [Question: was the inscription put above the fireplace before or after 1895?  If before, where would Wright have seen the aphorism?]

Anderson, Maxwell
See Walter Lippmann

Anderson, Sherwood
According to Priscilla Henken's diary of her year at Taliesin, 1942-43, on 26 January 1943, "Wright at tea read from Sherwood Anderson's Memoirs.  Said he's an interpretive, and not a creative artist"(Henken, p. 110).  The American novelist and short-story writer's Memoirs was published in 1942.

Anon: The Arabian Nights
In his essay "Books that have meant most to me," Wright said, "The Arabian Nights fascinated me as a boy.  Aladdin and his wonderful lamp—'imagination' was the lamp as I see now—was one of the tales that never tired me"(Bks.1932, p. 63).  In his autobiography he said the work was one of the books he read, with his friend Robie Lamp, as a child in Madison; and speaking of his later years, he said, "Aladdin and his wonderful lamp fascinated me as a boy, but now I knew the enchanting young Arabian was just a symbol for creative desire [and] imagination" (Auto.1932, pp. 31, 178). 
  For the relevance of The Arabian Nights to Wright’s designs for Baghdad, in the 1950s, see Levine.1996, pp. 272, 399-403, 431-32; and Alofsin.1999, pp.190-201.  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains a multi-volume edition, of 1885, of Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights.

Anon: The Bible
As the son of a minister, and with preachers also on his mother's side of the family, Wright was naturally familiar with the Bible from an early age.  In his autobiography he frequently referred to it and quoted from it.  For example: "Grandfather preached as Isaiah preached.  'The flower fadeth, the grass withereth—but the word of the Lord, thy God, endureth forever" (Auto.1932, p. 4). 
  Wright often referred specifically to Isaiah, with disapproval.  In recalling how, as a boy, he would take revenge on those who had hurt him, he wrote, "A reprobate element of character, this 'eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth.'  Worthy of Isaiah.  This ulcerous Mosaic-root of human misery. . ." (Auto.1932, p. 20).  In John Lloyd Wright's book about his father, an entire chapter is devoted to Wright's near-obsession with Isaiah; at one point, John said, "Perhaps Dad developed a psychological quirk when he was forced to memorize the fortieth chapter of Isaiah while yet a child" (JLW, p. 174). 
  Wright also read the Bible as an adult.  In his 1932 article on books that had most influenced him, he said, "Lately, finding the Bible in print by Cobden-Sanderson, I've found it entirely fresh reading and inspiring" (Bks.1932, p. 64).  "Cobden-Sanderson" refers to Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (1840-1922), the Arts-and-Crafts artist, bookbinder, and friend of William Morris; he created the Doves Press in 1900, whose letterpress publications included a five-volume "Doves Bible" (1902-04). 
  In A Testament (1957), in a section on "Influences and Inferences," Wright said, "I read, being a minister's son, much of the Bible" (Testament, p. 206).  Wright also referred to the teachings of Jesus; he wrote, for example, "The true architecture of democracy will be the externalizing of this inner seeing of the man as Jesus saw him, from within—not an animal or robot, but a living soul" ("Building a Democracy," 1946, in CW, vol. 4, p. 301).

Anon: The Mabinogion
In A Testament (1957), Wright said, "Creation is not only rare but always hazardous," and referred to the ancient Welsh saga Mabinogion: "Comes to mind a triad from the old Welsh Mabinogion defining genius—A man who sees nature.  Has a heart for Nature.  The courage to follow Nature" (Testament, p. 81).  The primary English-language edition of the work was by Lady Charlotte Guest: The Mabinogion, from the Welsh . . . translated with notes by Lady Charlotte Guest (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1877).  A well-worn copy of this editon is in the collection of Wright's books at Taliesin West, and is apparently the book that Wright read and drew his paraphrase from.

Aristophanes
Wright included Aristophanes among the authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).

Aristotle
In A Testament (1957), Wright included Aristotle in a list of authors he had read and "learned from" (Testament, p. 206).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains two editions of Aristotle's works––the "Politics" and "Rhetoric," which may have belonged to Wright.

Arnold, Matthew
See Saint Augustine.

Ashbee, Charles R.
The English architect and member of the Arts and Crafts movement Charles Ashbee was an early supporter of Wright, starting about 1900, and they eventually became close friends.  In 1902 Wright wrote to him, saying, "I caught your name in the 'Review' some time ago and read your article in one of our magazines . . . and my eyes are on the watch for signs of your work" (quoted in Jack Quinan, "Frank Lloyd Wright in 1893: The Chicago Context," in FLW/Ideas, pp. 129-30).   Wright may have been referring to an article Ashbee had published in American Architecture and Building News in 1896 ("An English Authority on the Bulfinch Front," 2 May 1896, pp. 45, 47); in any case, it shows that Wright was interested in Ashbee's writings—which included two utopian novels, From Whitechapel to Camelot (1892) and The Building of Thelema (1910).

Augustine, Saint
In several places in his writings, Wright attributed a quotation to Saint Augustine.  In a 1953 article on "Organic Architecture," he said, "St. Augustine once observed, 'The harvest shall not be yet'" (CW, vol. 5, p. 50; see also CW, vol. 5, p. 33).  In his 1925 "In the Cause of Architecture" article, Wright had used a longer phrase (although without attribution to Augustine): "the seed time is now but the harvest shall not be yet" (CW, vol. 1, p. 211). 
  The statement does come from St. Augustine's Confessions, Book Thirteen, although the standard English translations have a somewhat different wording: "sowings whose harvest shall not be until the end of time."  Wright's wording is found in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, in a passage attributed to St. Augustine, so it seems likely that Wright found the quotation when reading Arnold, rather than directly from Augustine's Confessions.

Bacon, Francis
Bacon is included in Wright's list of authors he "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained two editions of Bacon's essays (now lost), which might have belonged to Wright.

Badovici, Jean
In 1932 Jean Badovici, editor of the French journal L'Architecture vivante, produced a book on Wright's work (using material previously published in the journal): Frank Lloyd Wright, architecte américain (Paris: Editions Albert Morancé, 1932).  After receiving complimentary copies, Wright reportedly "found the book so appealing that he ordered an additional thirty" (Anthony Alofsin, Wright and New York [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019], p. 200).

Beard, Charles A.
In A Testament (1957), Wright included the historian Charles Beard in a list of authors he had "read and respected" (Testament, p. 206).  Beard's books on American social and economic history were published mainly from 1914 to 1932. For the connection between Wright and Beard, see Lionel March, "An Architect in Search of Democracy," in Brooks.1981, pp. 198-99.  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy of a book (now lost) described as Beard's "Basic History of the United States" (probably Charles and Mary Beard's History of the United States), which may have belonged to Wright.

Behrendt, Walter C.
The German writer Walter Behrendt was largely a supporter of Wright's work, but he considered it overly individualistic and exuberant.  When Wright saw an advance copy of Behrendt's essay for the catalogue of Wright's 1940 exhibition at the MoMA in New York, he was reportedly furious and wrote an angry telegram to the show's organizer, John McAndrew (Smith.2017, pp. 128-31).

Bel Geddes, Norman
Wright wrote to Stanley Marcus, 4 September 1933, saying he had had a copy of Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons, and liked it, but that he had lost the book (Joncas, p 187).  Geddes's Horizons was published in 1932.  In December of 1934 Bel Geddes sent Wright an article on streamlining from the November 1934 issue of the Atlantic Monthly (Joncas, p. 193).  According to Neil Levine, Aline Barnsdall gave Wright a copy of Bel Geddes's magazine In Which (Levine.1996, p. 457 n. 24).

Bellamy, Edward
Wright included Bellamy in the list of authors that accompanied the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935––names that Broadacre City "commemorated" (Reading Broadacre, p. 17).  Narciso G. Menocal has argued that Wright must have been familiar with Bellamy's writings, especially his popular utopian novel Looking Backward (1888); according to Menocal, "Ideas that Edward Bellamy had put forth in Looking Backward and Equality [1897] helped Wright to define Broadacre City" (Menocal, "Frank Lloyd Wright's Concept of Democracy," in FLW/Ideas, pp. 157-58).

Bemis, Albert Farwell
In May of 1934, Bemis wrote to Wright, sending him a copy of his recently-published The Evolving House (Joncas, p. 190).

Berlage, Hendrik Petrus
After visiting America in 1911, the Dutch architect Berlage played an important role in publicizing Wright's work in Europe, especially in three lectures he gave on "Neuere amerikanische Architektur," which were published in Schweizerische Bauzeitung in September 1912.  Wright had an English translation of the articles, and gave a copy of it to his client Darwin Martin (Alofsin.1993, p. 327, note 40).  In 1922, in a letter to the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud, Wright referred to "Dr. Berlage, whose criticism in Wendingen has just been read to me by one of your countrymen" (Letters/Archts, p. 52).  This would have been Berlage's article "Frank Lloyd Wright," in Wendingen IV (no. 11, 1921), pp. 2-18.

Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne
Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, in The Shining Brow (1960), recounted that after one of Wright's morning "sermons" at Taliesin West, he challenged the apprentices to "walk over the hills and see what is over the mountain," and then said, "When I was a boy I read a book called Arney, Arney Sol Bakken.  It was a little book.  Arney was always wondering what was over there, over the mountains. . . . One day, in spite of everything and everybody, he packed up, put a knapsack on his back, and started out to go over there.  And Arney never came back and nobody ever knew what he found" (OLW.1960, pp. 58-59). 
  This would have been the story "Arne," by the 19th-century Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, which had been translated into English and published, along with other stories by Bjørnson, by Rasmus B. Anderson (a resident of Madison, Wisconsin): Synnöve Solbakken, Arne, and Early Tales and Sketches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885).  The story is indeed about a boy who wonders "what I should see over the lofty mountains."  Wright had remembered the story well, although he had the title wrong. 

Blake, William
Wright often referred to the books of William Blake.  In his autobiography he included him among the authors he read as a young man; in describing the construction of Taliesin, he said, "William Blake says exuberance is beauty"; and he included Blake among the authors read at evening gatherings of the Taliesin Fellowship (Auto.1932, pp. 52, 175, 258).  In A Testament (1957), Wright began the book with an extended commentary on Blake's "exuberance is beauty" quotation, saying, "It took me some time to know just what the great Blake meant when he wrote that"; and later in the book, listing authors who had inspired him, Wright said, "I learned, too, from William Blake (all of his work I read)" (Testament, pp. 16, 206). 
  In his article on the books that had meant the most to him, Wright said, "In Blake I found the source of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England" (Bks.1932, p. 63).  In a 1941 article advocating a radical reorganization of the United States, Wright ended the piece with a quotation from Blake: "Great things are done when men and mountains meet.  This is not done by jostling in the street" (CW, vol. 4, p. 92).  This quotation was published in several editions of Blake's works, including The Poetical Works of William Blake, 1908.  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job (1935), The Writings of William Blake (1925), and William Blake's Designs for Gray's Poems (1922).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained seven of Blake's books (now lost), which may have belonged to Wright.

Boccaccio, Giovanni
In describing Louis Sullivan's genius, in an article of 1924, Wright compared Sullivan to several great artists of the past, saying that in comparison to him, "Boccaccio's imagination [was] no higher than a stable boy's" ("Louis Henry Sullivan," in CW, vol. 1, p. 199).  While this is not evidence that Wright actually read Boccaccio, it indicates at least that he had some familiarity with The Decameron.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a 1949 edition of The Decameron.

Borrow, George
Wright included Borrow in the list of authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writings of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  George Henry Borrow (1803-81) was an English writer of novels and travel books, especially interested in the Romany, or gypsies.  Wright may have been referring to Borrow's book Wild Wales: Its People, Language and Scenery, first published in 1862.

Bragdon, Claude
In 1930 Wright wrote a review of Bragdon's book on architectural ornament, The Frozen Fountain, which was published in The Saturday Review, 21 May 1932 (CW, vol. 3, pp. 67-68).

Brownell, Baker
Wright collaborated with the philosopher and social critic Baker Brownell in the writing of Architecture and Modern Life (1937).  In choosing Brownell for this role, Wright must have been familiar with his writings (such as The New Universe, 1926, and Earth Is Enough: An Essay on Religious Realism, 1933) and with his advocacy of decentralization of government and society, and of an "integrated" educational system.  In a dialogue between Wright and Brownell, included at the end of Architecture and Modern Life, Brownell said, "I have always had the impression that we agree on major things but disagree on all minor ones" (CW, vol. 3, p. 335).

Browning, Robert
Recalling his involvement in activities at All Soul's Church in Chicago, while working for the architect Silsbee, about 1887, Wright noted: "Browning classes.  I got 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' into my system about that time and 'The Ring and the Book" (Auto.1932, p. 72).  The Ring and the Book (1868) was one of the poet's popular works; "Rabbi Ben Ezra" was one of the sections of his book Dramatis Personae (1864).  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains an 1889 edition of The Poetical Works of Robert Browning.  Wright's mother's library contained several volumes of Browning's works (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website).

Brunton, Paul
On 13 October 1933 Wright reportedly ordered a copy of Paul Brunton's about-to-be-released A Search in Secret India (Joncas, p. 187).  Brunton (the pen name of Raphael Hurst) was a theosophist and spiritualist, and a proponent of "Oriental Mentalism."  (Wright perhaps ordered the book at the request of Olgivanna.)

Bryant, William Cullen
Listing the books and authors he read as a boy in Madison, with his friend Robie Lamp, Wright included "Bryant" (Auto.1932, p. 31).  They may have read Bryant's most popular poem, "Thanatopsis."

Buddha
Wright mentioned Buddha often in his writings, and included him in the list of authors and historical figures he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  In Genius and the Mobocracy (1949) he said, "It was the Buddha who noticed that the spoon may be in soup for a thousand years and never know the flavor of soup" (Genius/Mob, p. 6).  This is a paraphrase of one of the Buddha's sayings in the Dhammapada (chapter 5, no. 64). 
  In The Living City (1958), Wright said, "Buddha believed in nonvicarious effort—the spirit—only . . . only in effort disciplined from within" (CW, vol. 5, p. 269).  And in a 1951 article in Architectural Forum, Wright presented an extended "Dialogue" between himself ("Son of the West") and Buddha, which was largely a critique of American culture ("To the Young Man in Architecture," CW, vol. 5, pp. 28-29).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a book (now lost) entitled Buddha: His Life and Teachings, published in 1910.

Burnham, Daniel
In 1890 Daniel Burnham gave a talk in Chicago on the increasingly complex challenges faced by the architectural profession in an age of technological innovations; it was published in Inland Architect and News Record ("Association Notes," June 1890, p. 76).  Jack Quinan has argued that "Wright must surely have heard [the speech] or read it" (Quinan, "Frank Lloyd Wright in 1893: The Chicago Context," in FLW/Ideas, pp. 126-27).

Butler, Samuel
Wright mentioned Samuel Butler in several of his writings, and included him among the authors read at evening gatherings of the Taliesin Fellowship (Auto.1932, p. 258).  He also included Butler in the list of authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains two copies of the book Hudibras by the 17th-century poet Samuel Butler (1613-80), but Wright's mention of Butler in his writings refers to the 19th-century novelist of the same name (1835-1902), best known for his Utopian satire Erewhon (first published 1872), as well as The Way of All Flesh (1903).  (Wright may have acquired the copies of Hudibras as a result of a confusion of the two authors named Samuel Butler.)
  Wright credited Butler with the coining of the term "Usonia" for the United States of America, although researchers have not been able to find the word in Butler's writings.  Wright used the term starting in 1925, but his first attribution of it to Butler was apparently in his autobiography, when he describes his boyhood period on his uncle's farm and called the land "these Usonian grounds of the free," with an explanatory footnote: "Usonia—Samuel Butler's appropriate name for the United States of America" (Auto.1932, p 22).  (In the 2nd edition of the autobiography the footnote was moved into the text.)  The term "Usonia" was actually coined, apparently, by the Scots-American poet James D. Law, in Here and There in Two Hemispheres (Lancaster, PA, 1903), pp. 111-12. It is not known why Wright associated the word with Samuel Butler. 
  Another reference to Butler occurs later in Wright's autobiography: "So far as architecture goes, like Samuel Butler's 'Festus Jones,' eclectics haven't much artist-conscience and what little they have is guilty" (Auto.1932, p. 343).  And in A Testament (1957), Wright specifically mentioned Butler's most popular books: "Samuel Butler, author of The Way of All Flesh, originator of the modern realistic novel, in his Erewhon . . . pitied us for having no name of our own" (Testament, p. 160).  Wright said here that Butler coined the word "Usonia" in Erewhon. 
  Olgivanna Wright, listing some of Wright's favorite authors, wrote that he "valued Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, which he thought faithfully represented its era" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains a 1916 edition of The Way of All Flesh.

Carlyle, Thomas
Carlyle was one of the authors who most influenced Wright, in several ways.  In an essay he wrote in 1900, Wright spoke of how Carlyle contributed to his understanding of good writing, saying, "Carlyle gave us a phrasing of a truth, that (thanks to his good mother [i.e., Wright's mother]) should ring in every boy's head until he grasps its vital meaning and then (thanks to his good wife) be kept still ringing there"; he then quoted from Carlyle, "The Ideal is within thyself . . ." ("A Philosophy of Fine Art," unpublished speech, in CW, vol. 1, p. 39).  Wright quoted from Carlyle twice in his 1931 essay "Two Lectures on Architecture" (CW, vol. 2, pp. 83, 93). 
  Listing the books he read while a student at the University of Wisconsin, 1886-87 (personal readings, not course assignments), Wright included "Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Heroes and Hero Worship, [and] Past and Present" (Auto.1932, p. 52).  He added that after a romantic disappointment at that time, "Took Sartor Resartus to bed for consolation; but was inconsolable" (p. 54).  And in a section added to the second edition of his autobiography, he wrote, "As Carlyle said of Democracy . . . 'It is a disease.  Let us have it so we may have done with it and get on to rule by the bravest and the best'" (Auto.1943, p. 462). 
  In Wright's dialogue with Baker Brownell, included in Architecture and Modern Life (1947), Wright engages in an extended conversation about Carlyle and his works, speaking of Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and The French Revolution (CW, vol 3, p. 342).  And in the list of books Wright said he "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of the autobiography, he included Carlyle (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Copies of Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship and Past and Present are among Wright's surviving books in Oak Park (inscribed with his name and the dates 1901 and 1908, respectively). 
  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Sartor Resartus (published in 1898), which likely belonged to Wright, and did contain copies of Past and Present and Hero Worship (now lost), which may have belonged to Wright.  Carlyle's influence on Wright has been discussed in detail by Richard Joncas, in "Pure Form: the Origins and Development of Frank Lloyd Wright's Non-rectangular Geometry" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1991).

Carot, H.
David H. Hanks, in The Decorative Designs of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979, pp. 53, 55), says that Wright owned a copy of H. Carot's Kunstverglasungen, ein Musterbuch für Glaser (Berlin [1886]), and that its illustrations probably inspired some of Wright's earliest window designs, for example in his own house in Oak Park.  Carter Manny reportedly owned a copy of this book that had belonged to Wright, and which Manny donated to the archive of the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park (information from Maya Manny, 2018).

Catherwood, Frederick
See Stephens, John Lloyd

Cervantes, Miguel de
Describing his boyhood reading, in his article on the books that had meant the most to him, Wright said, "I remember Don Quixote was with me early" (Bks.1932, p. 63).  In his autobiography he listed Cervantes among the authors who had impressed him; and in describing motoring, in connection with Broadacre City, he wrote, "[As] Cervantes said, the Road is always better than the Inn" (Auto.1943, pp. 561, 330).  And he occasionally made reference to the characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as for example in an article on Louis Sullivan in 1924 ("Louis Henry Sullivan: His Work," in CW, vol. 1, p. 199).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained two copies of "Don Quixote" (now lost), which may have belonged to Wright.

Channing, William Ellery
In describing his boyhood while the family was living in Weymouth, Massachusetts (circa 1874-76) and the "private schooling" he received from his mother, Wright mentioned "the books of Channing, Emerson, Theodore Parker, [and] Thoreau" (Auto.1932, p. 15).  Channing was the foremost promoter of Unitarianism in the early 19th century; the Wrights would no doubt have read his published sermons and speeches, in which he opposed the Calvinist and Puritan doctrines of human depravity and a harsh God, advocating instead the Transcendentalist view of a loving, compassionate, and even Pantheist deity.

Chapman, Sydney John
In 1933 Wright reportedly ordered a book entitled "Political Economy" from London (Joncas, p. 186).  This may have been Sydney John Chapman's Political Economy (London: Williams and Norgate, 1912).

Chase, Ilka
According to Priscilla Henken's diary of her time at Taliesin in 1942, on October 11, "Wright read from Ilka Chase's Past Imperfect" (Henken, p. 29).  The actress and novelist's autobiography had just been published that year.

Chase, Mary Ellen
In the second edition of his autobiography, speaking of his two aunts who ran the Hillside Home School from 1887 to 1915, Wright said, "Mary Ellen Chase has drawn their portraits with a sympathetic hand in her book The Goodly Fellowship" (Auto.1943, p. 382).  Chase was an educator and author who had taught at the Hillside Home School at the beginning of her teaching career; A Goodly Fellowship was her autobiography. A copy of the book, published in 1939, is among the books at Taliesin.  

Cheney, Sheldon
In his autobiography, speaking of the "travesty" of 20th-century American taste, Wright mentioned the art and theater critic Sheldon Cheney, whose book The New World Architecture was published in 1930 (and included several of Wright's works): "As Sheldon Cheney has truly said in his New World Architecture, 'we are, as a nation, standing at the beginning of a world slope in this obscured human interest called architecture'" (Auto.1932, p. 348).  (In the second edition of the autobiography, Wright revised this to read, ". . . in his book New World Architecture, I think it was, . . ." (Auto.1943, p. 331).  Cheney and his wife reportedly became personal friends of Wright and Olgivanna Wright. (Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright and New York, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019, p. 203).

Cheng Sui
See Lao-Tzu.

Church, Albert E.
One of Wright's earliest surviving drawings, apparently done for one of his geometry or drawing courses when he attended the University of Wisconsin in 1885-86, is labeled "Problem 29, to pass a plane tangent to a hyperbolic paraboloid at a given point on the surface" (Taliesin drawing no. 14003).  This drawing was clearly based on Problem 29 (described with the same words Wright used) in Albert E. Church's Elements of Descriptive Geometry with its applications to spherical projections, shades and shadows [etc.] (New York: Barnes & Burr, 1865 and later editions).  See Koppany, vol 3, pp. 804-812.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
In his 1957 book A Testament, Wright included the poet Coleridge in a list of writers, artists, and thinkers he admired. (The others on the list: "Jesus, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Beethoven, Bach, Brunelleschi, Goethe, Rembrandt, Dante, Cervantes, Giotto, Mantegna, Leonardo, Bramante, Angelo.") While this doesn't necessarily mean that Wright had read Coleridge's poems, it's likely that he did have some familiarity with them, especially the most famous of them, such as "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." (Testament, p. 37).

Condit, Carl
In 1952, Wright told Lewis Mumford that he had just read Condit's The Rise of the Skyscraper (Chicago, 1952) and had found it "sodden with fact and false in spirit," and said "I see the affair [i.e. the development of the skyscraper], from the inside, quite differently" (FLW&LM, p. 206).

Confucius
According to Priscilla Henken's diary of her period as an apprentice at Taliesin, on 24 January 1943, "Wright read from some Chinese philosophers tonight––Kung Fu Tse (Confucius), Cheng Sui, and Laotse" (Henken, p. 109).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a book entitled The Wisdom of Confucius (1943), and did contain another book on Confucius, now lost.

Corneille, Pierre
In his autobiography, Wright said that when he took a French course at the University of Wisconsin, one of the readings was "Le Cid" (Auto.1932, p. 52).  This was presumably Corneille's "Le Cid."

Cram, Ralph Adams
In an article of 1929, speaking of modernism and history, Wright referred to the Gothic-revival architect and author Ralph Adams Cram: "Edificer Cram quotes, 'No one who begins a cause is ever allowed to finish it,' calling [on] History as witness.  It seemed to comfort him" ("Surface Mass—Again!", in CW, vol. 1, p. 324).  It is unclear whether Wright is quoting directly from Cram here, but he is likely to have read some of Cram's writings, in particular his Impressions of Japanese Architecture (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1905).

Dante Alighieri
In A Testament (1957), Wright included Dante in a list of authors and composers who had provided him "inspiration" (Testament, p. 205).

De Carlo, Giancarlo
In September 1953, Wright sent Lewis Mumford an English translation of an article by the Italian architect and critic Giancarlo De Carlo ("Wright e l'Europa," in Sele Arte, I, September 1952, pp. 17-24) (FLW&LM, p. 237).  Wright clearly approved of this "Italian appraisal," as he called it; he added, "Why couldn't Whiskers [i.e., Henry-Russell Hitchcock] have written something like that.  Because he is not a Grancarlo de Carlos [sic], I guess."

Defoe, Daniel
Describing his boyhood reading, in his article on the books that had meant the most to him, Wright mentioned Robinson Crusoe (Bks.1932, p. 63).

Dewey, John
In A Testament (1957), Wright included John Dewey in a list of American "poets and philosophers" he had "read and respected" (Testament, p. 206).  For parallels between the ideas of Dewey and those of Wright, see Lionel March, “An Architect in the Search of Democracy,” in Brooks.1981, pp. 202-04.

Dickens, Charles
Speaking of his visit to London in 1941, Wright described the Garland Hotel, where they stayed, as being "As English as anything in Pickwick"—i.e., Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (Auto.1943, p. 535).  Olgivanna Wright, listing some of her husband's favorite authors, wrote, "Dickens too he enjoyed" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  Wright's surviving library at Taliesin West contains copies of two other Dickens novels, The Old Curiosity Shop (1907) and A Christmas Carol (1941).  

Dodge, Mary M.
Listing books he read as a child, with his friend Robie Lamp, circa 1880, Wright included "Hans Brinker" (Auto.1932, p. 31).  This was Mary M. Dodge's popular novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates, published in 1865.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor
In his 1932 article on his favorite books, Wright said, "I have read with enthusiasm the great Russians . . . from Tolstoy and Gogol to Gorky and Dostoyevski [sic]" (Bks.1932, p. 64).  Later, speaking of his visit to the Soviet Union in 1937, he wrote, "At that time I knew Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and Gogol" (Auto.1943, p. 556).  Most of Dostoevsky's novels had appeared in English translations by 1900 (including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamozov)
  Olgivanna Wright, describing some of her husband's favorite authors, wrote, "He appreciated Dostoevsky who, he thought, had best interpreted the search and indecision of those immersed in the wild passions and sorrows of the spirit that characterized his age" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1949), and did contain a copy (now lost) of "Dostoevsky Reminiscences."

Douglas, Clifford Hugh
Wright's list of authors he "consulted" or "remembered" while writing his autobiography contains "Major Douglas" (Auto.1943, p. 561).  This must refer to Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952), British advocate of the "Social Credit" economic reform movement.  His principal publications were Economic Democracy (1920), Credit-Power and Democracy (1920), and Social Credit (1924).  Kenneth Frampton has said that Douglas was "patently" the source of Wright's social-credit proposals of the 1930s and 1940s (CW, vol. 4, Introduction, p. 8).  See also: Lionel March, "An Architect in Search of Democracy," in Brooks.1981, p. 199.

Dow, Arthur Wesley
Several scholars, notably Kevin Nute, have suggested that Wright was familiar with Dow's book Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education (Boston: J. M. Bowles, 1899).  Dow, an artist and expert on Japanese art, mainly used Japanese examples to illustrate his esthetic principles.  See Nute, pp. 86-98.

Drexler, Arthur
See Philip Johnson

Dumas, Alexandre (père)
According to Olgivanna Wright, in her 1966 book on Wright, "Among the French novelists he read avidly were Victor Hugo, whom he often quoted, and Dumas, particularly his The Three Musketeers (OLW.1966, p. 140).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains copies of Dumas's The Black Tulip and Chicot the Jester, and did contain a copy (now lost) of Marguerite de Valois.  An 1898 copy of The Three Musketeers is among the books at Taliesin.

Du Noüy, Pierre Lecomte
In Genius and the Mobocracy (1949), speaking of an "honest search for an ideal," Wright listed several philosophers who embodied "expressions of the interior (or organic) ideal," and included "Lecomte du Noüy" (CW, vol. 4, p. 359).  Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, a contemporary French scientist and philosopher, wrote books both in French and English; Wright could have known his Biological Time (1937), Human Destiny (1947), or The Road to Reason (1948).  A copy of Human Destiny is among the books at Taliesin.

Dunne, Peter Finley
Recalling his childhood, Wright's son John Lloyd Wright wrote, "Papa liked to read [aloud] 'Mr. Dooley.' . . . He would go into convulsions before he gained much headway. . . . I think his favorite was 'Life at Newport'" (JLW, p. 30).  Dunne's stories about an immigrant bartender's commentaries on American life, in Irish dialect, appeared in newspapers starting in 1893 and collections of them were then published as books.  "Life at Newport" was included in Mr. Dooley's Opinions, published in 1901.

Eddy, Mary Baker
It is not known if Wright actually read Mary Baker Eddy's textbook of the Christian Science religion, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, but he knew of the work and probably learned about Christian Science doctrines from his second wife, Miriam Noel, who was an adherent to the religion. In his autobiography he wrote that when Noel first visited him, in his Chicago office (in late 1914), she held in her hand "a small, black, limp book. She laid it on the desk. It was a copy of 'Science and Health' by Mary Baker Eddy. Her latest study in psychology" (Auto.1932, p. 201). The list that was made of Olgivanna Wright's books, following her death, includes a copy of Science and Health. This copy no longer survives, so its publication date is unknown, but it may have been the copy that Noel gave to Wright.

Ellis, Havelock
Mamah Borthwick's translation, from the Swedish, of Ellen Key's The Woman Movement, begun when she and Wright were living in Europe in 1910-11, and then published in 1912, contained an introduction by the pioneering English sexologist Havelock Ellis; in it, he discussed Key's ideas and noted that they were now "presented to the reader in English"—showing that he had read Borthwick's translation.  Borthwick and Wright were no doubt interested in Ellis's writings, in particular his multi-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex, published 1897-1910.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Speaking of his boyhood when his family lived in Weymouth, Massachusetts (1884-86), Wright included Emerson among the authors whose books his mother provided for him, representing "the transcendentalism of Concord" (Auto.1932, p. 15).  These may have included works by Emerson that are in a list of books owned by his mother: "Poems—Emerson," "Ralph Waldo Emerson. Life, Etc.," and "Emerson's Essays" (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website). 
  Throughout his life, Wright referred to Emerson in his writings.  In an essay he wrote in 1896 he quoted Emerson as saying "Art is life" ("Architect, Architecture, and the Client," CW, vol. 1, p. 28).  In 1900 he wrote, "We walk in the cool, calm shade of the trees, and they say to us as they said to Emerson long ago, 'Why so hot my little man?'" ("A Philosophy of Fine Art," CW, vol. 1, p. 43)—a line Wright quoted again in his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 465). 
  In Modern Architecture, of 1931, Wright quoted Emerson as having said, "I love and honor Epaminondas––but I do not wish to be Epaminondas.  I hold it more just to love the world of this hour, than the world of his hour" (Modern Architecture, Being the Kahn Lectures, in CW, vol. 2, p. 47).  In 1932 he included Emerson among the authors who influenced him in his youth and who "are much more with me now" (Bks.1932, p. 63).  In his 1937 book Architecture and Modern Life, speaking of architectural order, Wright wrote, "Architecture is this aura (or 'oversoul' as Emerson might say) of structure" (CW, vol. 3, p. 219). 
  In an unpublished article of 1945, about a disagreement he had with Dorothy Parker, Wright wrote, "And dear Emerson!  He never foresaw that some accomplished writer might take his 'Hitch your wagon to a star' so literally" (CW, vol. 4, p. 279-80).  And in The Living City, of 1958, he included an extended excerpt from Emerson's discussion of farming in Society and Solitude ("Appendix, From Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essay on Farming," The Living City, in CW, vol. 5, pp. 341-43).   
For discussions of Emerson's influence on Wright, see Naomi Tanabe Uechi, Evolving Transcendentalism in Literature and Architecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 75-96; and Uechi's "For You O Democracy: How American Transcendentalism Helped Define Organic Architecture," Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Fall 2016, pp. 17-23. 
  None of Emerson's works are currently preserved in the collections of Wright's books at Taliesin West and Oak Park, but he clearly had access to Emerson's writings throughout his life.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains four copies of Emerson's works (see the Olgivanna Wright section of this website) and did contain several more, now lost.  Wright's mother's library contained at least eight books by or about Emerson (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website).  Emerson's influence on Wright has been discussed in detail by Richard Joncas in "Pure Form: the Origins and Development of Frank Lloyd Wright's Non-rectangular Geometry" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1991).

Fadiman, Clifton
The author and critic Clifton Fadiman wrote an unflattering review of the second edition of Wright's autobiography (The New Yorker, 22 May 1943), which Wright and his family members read.  Priscilla Henken, in the diary of her time at Taliesin, noted for 23 May 1943, "Mrs. W. more upset than FLLW about Clifton Fadiman's New Yorker criticism of the Autobiography" (Henken, p. 165).  This suggests that Wright regularly read The New Yorker––a point that he himself had indicated in 1932, in his "Books that have meant most to me" article (CW, vol. 3, p. 64).  

Fenollosa, Ernest
In Wright's unpublished essay on Japanese prints of 1917, he wrote, "When I first saw a fine print about twenty-five years ago, it was an intoxicating thing.  At that time Ernest Fenollosa was doing his best to persuade the Japanese people not to destroy their works of art" ("The Print and the Renaissance," CW, vol. 1, p. 149).  Fenollosa was a cousin and close friend of Wright's first employer, Joseph Lyman Silsbee, and Wright surely knew Fenellosa's book The Masters of Ukioye: a Complete Historical Description of Japanese Paintings and Color Prints (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1896).  Wright referred again to Fenollosa in a passage on Japan in his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 522).  See Nute, pp. 24-27, 74-84, 179.

Feuillet, Octave
In his autobiography Wright said that when he took a French course at the University of Wisconsin he read the "Romance of the Poor Young Man" (Auto.1932, p. 52).  This would have been Octave Feuillet's popular Le Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre, originally published in 1858.  See the note on Wright's knowledge of foreign languages, in the introduction to this website.

Field, Dorothy Johnson
Wright's 1934 article "The Two-Zone House" begins with a statement that a house-design proposal in a letter from "housewife Field" inspired him to "work upon the idea" and that Field's letter was "directly responsible for the germ plan of the Two-Zone house" (CW, vol. 3, p. 172).  The introduction to this article in the Collected Writings explains that this was Dorothy Johnson Field, that her ideas were amplified in her book The Human House (1939), and that Wright's Two-Zone house project quickly evolved into his "Usonian house, his solution for the modern dwelling of the American of moderate means" (CW, vol.3, p. 172).  Regardless of whether Wright actually read The Human House, his acknowledgment that Field's ideas, in her letter to him, inspired one of his seminal designs makes her work relevant to the development of his housing concepts.  

Fiske, John
Recalling his childhood, in his autobiography, Wright wrote, "I remember John Fiske (the great historian) coming to the little brown house by the lake, coming there to dine with Father, Mother afterward remarking upon the great man's voracious appetite (as famous as his histories)" (Auto.1943, p. 423).  There is no indication that Wright read the writings of this American philosopher, historian, and promoter of Darwin's theory of evolution, but the fact that Fiske knew Wright's parents emphasizes the family's interest in late-19th-century intellectual and literary currents.  Wright's mother's library contained two of Fiske's books (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website).

Fistere, John Cushman
The December 1931 issue of Vanity Fair contained an article on contemporary architecture by the critic John Cushman Fistere ("Poets in Steel," pp. 58-59, 98), in which Wright was denigrated in several ways—for example, being compared unfavorably to Raymond Hood.  Wright wrote a rebuttal, which remained unpublished, and sent a copy of Fistere's article to Lewis Mumford (FLW&LM, p. 117; Smith.2017, p. 72).

Forster, E. M.
In a letter to Lewis Mumford, of January 1952, Wright lamented what he saw as a cooling of their friendship, and wrote, "I fear that . . . the Llewis of my youth may be no more, [replaced by] the professionalized successful Critic with unbreakable engagements—an E. M. Forster "Critic" (see his last book "Two Cheers for Democracy" and read his piece on the 'Raison d'être of Criticism,' if you have not already read it).  You will see what I mean." (FLW&LM, p. 211).  Forster's Two Cheers For Democracy had just been published (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951); a copy of it is among the books at Taliesin. "Raison d'être of Criticism" had appeared in Horizon, December 1948, pp. 397-411.

Frankl, Paul Theodore
In 1935 Wright wrote a brief article, "Form and Reform," which was ostensibly a review of the designer and author Paul Theodore Frankl's book Form and Reform: A Practical Handbook for Modern Interiors, but it actually dealt with several of Frankl's publications, about which Wright spoke favorably.  He called Frankl's first book, New Dimensions (1928) "a good work"; said he generally liked the designs in Form and Reform (1930) and Machine-Made Leisure (1932); and said, "No decorator or interior architect among them all has a clearer or more sensible grasp upon what the 'new' means in furniture and decoration than Frankl." (CW, vol. 3, p. 183-84).  Wright spoke of Frankl as a personal friend, and he clearly was familiar with his publications.

Froebel, Friedrich
In his autobiography and elsewhere, Wright spoke of the important influence, in his childhood, of the Froebel Kindergarten System and the Kindergarten Gifts, which his mother had found at the Philadelphia exposition of 1876 and acquired for her son and daughter. 
  Preserved among Wright's effects at Taliesin West are one of the "Gifts" (no. 14, the "Weaving Paper") and the catalog or manual that came along with the Gifts: "Kindergarten Gifts and Occupation Material," issued by E. Steiger, New York, May 1876 (probably a translation or version of one of Froebel's German-language publications).  This manual and an accompanying sheet entitled "Effect of the Kindergarten System" speak of the educational principles and goals of the system, and how each of the Gifts is to be used by the child. 
  Considering that Wright was already nine years old in 1876, it is likely that his mother had him read these instructions, rather than merely showing him how to manipulate the Gifts—so this manual can be included among his early readings.  See Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., "'Form Became Feeling,' A New View of Froebel and Wright" and "Frank Lloyd Wright's Mementoes of Childhood," in Kaufmann, Nine Commentaries on Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: The Architectural History Foundation, 1989), pp. 1-6, 19-34.

Fuller, Buckminster
In a letter to Wright of 5 July 1938, Fuller said he had learned from the Saturday Review of Literature that Wright was going to review his new book Nine Chains to the Moon (Joncas, p. 214).  Wright did write the review, and it appeared in the September 1938 issue of the magazine.

Gale, Zona
In his autobiography Wright spoke of the novelist and playwright Zona Gale, whom he knew personally through family connections in Wisconsin and Oak Park; he noted, "While in Japan [i.e., probably in the early 1920s] I read Lulu Bett" (Auto.1943, p. 507).  Miss Lulu Bett, published in 1920, was one of Gale's most popular novels; her stage adaptation of it received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. 

Gannett, William Channing
In 1896-97 Wright designed and produced (with his client William H. Winslow) an elegant edition of Gannett's The House Beautiful.  The Unitarian minister's essay was popular at this time (it had previously been published as a book by James West Publishers, Boston, 1895) and apparently influenced Wright's thinking about house design. Jerome Klinkowitz has written, "For Wright, thoughts on Ruskin's esthetics and Morris's practical applications would most immediately come from . . . Gannett's sermon-like essay," and has discussed Gannett's influence on Wright in detail.  See Klinkowitz, pp. 16-25.

George, Henry
Wright began referring to the economic theorist Henry George about 1930, and it is clear that George's ideas influenced the thinking underlying Wright's Broadacre City.  In The Disappearing City, of 1932, he listed George among the most important American thinkers regarding individual freedom; said, "Communual ownership by way of taxation of all communal resources is not necessarily communism, as Henry George pointed out with complete logic"; and said that George "showed us the simple basis of poverty in human society" (CW, vol. 3, pp. 75, 87, 98). 
  Wright referred to George's ideas again in An Organic Architecture, of 1939 (CW, vol. 3, pp. 320, 332); in The New Frontier: Broadacre City, of 1940, saying "Broadacres follows Henry George in the belief that a man should not only hold his land by way of his own use and improvements, but dedicate himself to it in the best sense of the spirit" (CW, vol. 4, p. 52); compared the ideas of George and Silvio Gesell in the 1943 addendum to his autobiography, "Book Six: Broadacre City" (CW, vol. 4, p. 247); wrote a brief, unpublished essay on George in 1947 ("Concerning Henry George: Freedom vs. Speculation," CW, vol. 4, p. 304); and spoke of George again in The Living City, of 1958 (CW, vol. 5, pp. 286, 308).  
  Wright also included George in the list of authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  None of George's writings are found in the collections of his books at Taliesin West and in Oak Park, but Wright surely was familiar, at least, with George's most popular and influential book, Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879.  In the Broadacre-City addendum to his autobiography, of 1943, Wright in fact said that the prefaces to Gesell's Natural Economic Order and George's Progress and Poverty were "two of the finest things in recorded English" (CW, vol. 4, p. 247).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a 1929 edition of George's Progress and Poverty, which likely belonged to Wright.   

Gesell, Silvio
Wright included the German socialist and economic theorist Silvio Gesell (1862-1930) in the list of authors that accompanied the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935 (Reading Broadacre, pp. 16-17).  And he included him among the authors who had influenced him, in the 1943 edition of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  He also referred to Gesell's ideas, along with those of Henry George, in the separately published "Book Six: Broadacre City" of 1943, commending "Henry George for the ground and Silvio Gesell for the money" (i.e., the economic aspects of Broadacre City).  He wrote, "Silvio Gesell's Natural Economic Order was as necessary to Henry George's success as Henry George was necessary to Gesell's success.  The two men are opposite but harmonious sides of the same shield," adding that the prefaces to these two books are among "the finest things in recorded English" (CW, vol. 4, p. 247). 
  The Natural Economic Order
was the English translation of Gesell's most influential book, Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung durch Freiland und Freigeld, first published in 1916.  For Gesell's influence on Wright, see Lionel March, "An Architect in Search of Democracy: Broadacre City," in Brooks.1981, pp. 196-200. 

Giacosa, Giuseppe
In his list of authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography, Wright included "Giacosa" (Auto.1943, p. 561).  This was presumably the Italian poet and librettist Giuseppe Giacosa.  One of his books had been translated into English (The Stronger: Like Falling Leaves, Sacred Ground, published in 1913), but Giacosa was best known for his librettos of Puccini's operas La Bohème, Tosca, and Madama Butterfly.

Gibbon, Edward
In A Testament (1957), in a passage about the authors he had "read and respected." Wright said, "Historicism always seemed equivocal to me; the best of the histories Gibbon's Rome"––that is, Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Testament, p. 206).  Wright also revealed, however, that he had pawned "my father's Gibbon's Rome" when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin and needed money to go to move to Chicago (Testament, p. 17)

Gibran, Kahlil
In April 1934, Wright's apprentice Gene Massenlink reported that Wright had given a lecture in Janesville, Wisconsin, in which he had quoted from Gibran's The Prophet (Joncas, p. 190).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained copies (now lost) of Gibran's The Prophet and Mirrors of the Soul.

Giedion, Siegfried
In a letter to Lewis Mumford in 1952, speaking of books on the history of modern architecture, he said, "Such history as I've read (by Gideon, say)...is so specious a pretense of knowledge––that my gorge rises as I read" (FLW&LM, pp. 206-07).  "Gideon" must refer to Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture, published in 1941.

Gilbert, W. S. (librettist) and Arthur Sullivan (composer)
In his autobiography, Wright recalled his delight, as a boy in Madison, in singing the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, to the piano accompaniment of his sister Jennie––"born of true lyrical genius" (Auto.1932, p. 33).  In A Testament (1957), he wrote, "My enthusiasm for 'sermons in stones and books in running brooks' was not 'fascination frantic for ruins romantic––when sufficiently decayed'" (Testament, p. 205).  Wright's second quotation is from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado (the first is a paraphrase from Shakespeare).

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
In his autobiography, Wright referred several times to Goethe.  He included "Wilhelm Meister" among the books he read as a teenager in Madison (Auto.1932, pp. 31, 52), and speaking of his frustration with the curriculum at the University of Wisconsin, he said, "Reading Goethe only made matters worse, for action . . . was [my] urge" (Auto.1932, p. 57).  In describing the "Playhouse" he created at Taliesin, he wrote, "I had wanted a theater of my own ever since when, as a boy, I read of Wilhelm Meister's puppet-theatre in the attic of the house Goethe designed for him" (Auto.1943, p. 446); and he quoted lines recalled from one of Goethe's poems, "When I ride through a village and the dogs begin to bark..." (Auto.1932, p. 328). 
  In an essay on the Japanese print, of 1917, Wright said, "As Goethe sang in his 'Hymn to Nature'—'the wellsprings of human activity are few'" ("The Print and the Renaissance," CW, vol. 1, p. 151).  And in "Two Lectures on Architecture," of 1931, he said, "Goethe observed that death was nature's ruse in order that she might have more life" (CW, vol. 2, p. 97).  No works by Goethe are preserved among Wright's books at Taliesin West or in Oak Park, but he must have read one of the several editions of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (the English version of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre). 
  Wright also reportedly read Goethe's Letters from Italy, prior to his departure for Europe in 1909 (Alofsin.1993, p. 337, note 111).  And in 1915 Wright published Goethe's "Hymn to Nature" in the Little Review (which he said he had helped Mamah Borthwick Cheney translate into English when they were in Europe [Sweeney, item 125]).  The reference to one of Goethe's poems suggests that Wright also read some of the author's poetry, and in this regard it is interesting that a list of books belonging to his mother includes "Goethe's Poems" (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy of Goethe's Faust, now lost.

Gogol, Nikolai
See Dostoevsky.
Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy of Gogol's Dead Souls, now lost.

Gorky, Maxim
See Dostoevsky.

Grundvig, Nikolai F. S.
Wright's list of authors he "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography contains "Grundvig" (Auto.1943, p. 561).  This must be the Danish author N. F. S. Grundvig, but it is unclear why Wright would have been interested in him––especially since none of his works were apparently available in English.

Gurdjieff, George Ivanovich
The doctrines and practices of the Russian mystic Gurdjieff seem to have influenced Wright, especially in the creation and operation of the Taliesin Fellowship, but it is unclear to what extent Wright actually read Gurdjieff's writings. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright was a devoted follower of the mystic since her early years in his group of disciples in Europe, and throughout her life with Wright she promoted the guru's teachings to her husband, even urging him, in 1934, to invite Gurdjieff to move his organization to Taliesin—a plan that did not come to pass, although Gurdjieff did make a couple of visits to Taliesin at this time.
  In 1949 Olgivanna received an advance copy of Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (published the following year), the first book of his projected trilogy All and Everything, and Wright began a series of "readings" and talks on Gurdjieff to his Fellowship apprentices—as well as performances of the music and dance movements that were an integral part of the guru's teachings. Recordings of several of these Fellowship talks were made, in which Wright spoke about Gurdjieff and his ideas, but without specific quotations from Beelzebub's Tales—a book that is generally acknowledged to be convoluted and difficult to read.
  At one point in his Fellowship talk of 9 March 1952, Wright spoke of Gurdjieff's disciple P. D. Ouspensky, who had already published writings on the master's doctrines; Wright said, "Ouspensky wrote and gave voice to many of the things that Gurdjieff had said in such a contemptuous, round-about way that they seemed immaterial. But Ouspensky made them material, made them understandable." This suggests that Wright learned more about Gurdjieff's ideas from reading Ouspensky than from reading Gurdjieff himself. In any case, Wright certainly learned about Gurdjieff mainly from his wife Olgivanna. (Information and transcripts provided to me by Indira Berndtson, January 2021.) See also Ouspensky.

Hale, Edward Everett
Describing his boyhood reading, in his article on books that had meant the most to him, Wright said, "My father threw in Edward Everett Hale's The Man Without a Country, and that made a deep impression" (Bks.1932, p. 63).  Wright gave a copy of this book to his son David in 1905––inscribed "David Wright, Sept. 1905 from Father" (Family Library, p. 9).

Haskell, Douglas
In a 1928 letter to Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Wright referred to the architectural critic Douglas Haskell's "post-mortem in Creative Arts [sic], which I have only just read," criticizing it for being too aligned with "the Surface and Mass Architecture of the French"  (Letters/Archts, p. 133).  Haskell's article was "Organic Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright" (in Creative Art, November 1928, pp li-lvii).  In early 1929 Wright wrote to Haskell, saying, "I got a tardy look at your Creative Art post-mortem"; he chided "both yourself and Russell Hitchcock," challenging them to "see deeper than your Frenchmen," and said "I wrote a review of your article." (Wright's letter, which was not sent to Haskell, was shown to Lewis Mumford and is reproduced in FLW&LM, pp. 65-66). 
  Wright's "review," which appeared in Architectural Record, July 1929, was largely a rebuke of the International Style and spoke of Haskell and Hitchcock as young critics who "see in 'surface and mass' abstractions . . . 'inspired by French painting'" ("Surface and Mass—Again!" CW, vol. 1, p. 324-28).  In the first edition of Wright's autobiography (1932) he spoke favorably of comments Haskell made at a New York Town Hall event in September 1931 (Auto.1943, p. 338), but this passage was cut from the second, 1943 edition of the autobiography.)  See also H.-R. Hitchcock.  

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
In his autobiography Wright said, "Millions of consciences like yours and mine . . . are essential to the life of any honest country wherein Democracy may be, after all, only that 'state of unhappy consciousness,' which Hegel said it was" (Auto.1943, p. 381).  The "state of unhappy consciousness" was one of Hegel's concepts, for example in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of The Philosophy of Hegel (1954).

Hemingway, Ernest
In January of 1956, the New York Times reported Wright's reaction to criticism that Ernest Hemingway had reportedly made of Wright's design for the Masieri Memorial building in Venice. Wright is quoted as saying, "Ernest Hemingway, the author, was in Africa when he raised objection to the Venice building. When I was asked to comment on Hemingway's statement, I merely stated, 'Why should I reply to a voice in the jungle?' Hemingway said he was a friend of mine, but I've never met him. However, I've admired some of his work." (New York Times, 29 Jan. 1956; brought to my attention by Indira Berndtson, June 2021.) Since Wright didn't specify any particular work by Hemingway he had read, it's hard to know exactly what to make of this statement.

Heraclitus
Speaking of the nature of "Change," in his autobiography, Wright said, "I have long seen it as Reality.  Perhaps as Heraclitus said—the only reality we may see" (Auto.1943, p. 376).  Wright included Heraclitus in the list of historical figures he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  In a brief essay of 1955, "The Eternal Law," he wrote, "Human traditions should be made and maintained subject to the Law of Change. . . Heraclitus, radical Greek" (CW, vol. 5, p.129).  And in A Testament (1957), Wright included Heraclitus among the figures who had inspired him (Testament, p. 206).

Herodotus
In an unpublished essay of 1943, "The New Discretion," critical of the United States government, Wright said, "Herodotus, asked why all Nations perished, said, 'First, Success, then as a consequence of success, arrogance and injustice; then as a consequence of arrogance and injustice: downfall'" (CW, vol. 4, p. 117).  [I cannot find where Herodotus said this.]

Hickling, G.
In 1941 Wright wrote a review of the political views of G. Hickling, editor of the English journal Reality (CW, vol. 4, pp. 100-01).  The review, which advocated isolationism, was not published.  In the "Book Six" addition to his autobiography, of 1943, Wright quotes Hickling as saying, regarding anyone who "challenge[s] Money," "There is a greater service to be rendered by him than to die for his country" (CW, vol. 4, p. 247).  In Priscilla Henken's diary of her time at Taliesin in 1942, she noted, for October 5, "Wright read from Reality, a British news weekly, at tea" (Henken, p. 25).

Hiroshige
Wright was a passionate admirer and collector of Japanese woodblock prints, in particular the works of Hiroshige and Hokusai. As various times he possessed multiple sets of Hiroshige's Tokaido series of landscape prints (The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido), one set of which he gave to his friend Alexander Woollcott in the late 1920s or early 1930s (Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius,Years with Frank Lloyd Wright [New York, McGraw-Hill, 1979], p. 180). Although these sets of thematic woodblock prints are not exactly "books," they deserve to be mentioned in this compilation of publications that Wright possessed or was familiar with.

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
In 1928 Wright wrote to Henry-Russell Hitchcock about an essay by Hitchcock ("Frank Lloyd Wright") that had just appeared in a special issue on Wright's work in the French publication Cahiers d'Art (Paris, [1928]).  The essay was favorable about the more progressive aspects of Wright's work but criticized its use of ornament and considered it largely out of date.  Wright told Hitchcock that he had failed to see his work correctly and should be "shot at sunrise as a traitor to your country," but he nevertheless offered his friendship and invited Hitchcock to "journey to this neck of the woods" and learn about his work" (Letters/Archts, p. 133). 
  Also in 1928, Wright wrote a rebuttal (not published) to two articles Hitchcock had written in Architectural Record (April and May, 1928), as well as an article by Douglas Haskell (Creative Art, November 1928), in which Wright's work was portrayed as merely a forerunner of European modernism ("In the Cause of Architecture: Purely Personal," CW, vol. 1, pp. 255-58).  In 1930 Wright wrote another, sarcastic essay (also not published) on Hitchcock's 1929 book Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration, in which Hitchcock had portrayed Wright's work as insufficiently progressive ("Poor Little American Architecture," CW, vol. 2, pp. 15-17). 
  In 1932 Hitchcock published an essay on Wright's work in the catalog for the "Modern Architecture" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Wright immediately wrote to Hitchcock, saying, "Thanks for the biography," but then detailing seventeen facts he had gotten wrong  (Letters/Archts, pp 134-36).  And Wright disparaged Hitchcock again in two articles in 1935 (CW, vol. 3, pp. 182, 188).  But their relationship improved when Hitchcock's position on Wright's work became more favorable, and Wright cooperated with the production of Hitchcock's 1942 book In the Nature of Materials.  Hitchcock had written an essay for the catalog of the exhibition of Wright's work at the MoMA in New York in 1940; when Wright saw it he wrote to Hitchcock, "As I read your piece for the Museum catalogue I considered it both fair to me and valuable, withal well written" (Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, "The Hitchcock Collection Comes Home," Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Fall 1910, p. 11).  See Levine.2015, p. 405, note 7.  See also the entry here on Douglas Haskell.  

Holme, Charles
According to Eduard Sekler, in his book on the Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann, Bruce Goff told him, in 1976, that Wright had known Hoffmann's Purkersdorf Sanatorium from Charles Holme's book The Art Revival in Austria (London: Offices of The Studio, 1906) (Sekler, Josef Hoffmann, The Architectural Work [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985], p. 509, note 8, p. 510, note 19).

Hood, Raymond
In 1931, Wright wrote a review of the book his fellow architect Raymond Hood had just published, Contemporary American Architects: Raymond H. Hood.  Wright's review, which remained unpublished, is light-hearted and rather satirical; he did not think much of Hood's architecture, but they were good friends.  In the review, Wright quotes from the book's foreword, written by Arthur Tappan North (CW, vol. 3, pp. 28-31).

Hovey, Richard
Explaining, in his autobiography, why he named his home Taliesin, Wright said, "Richard Hovey's charming masque 'Taliesin' had made me acquainted with his image of the historic bard" (Auto.1932, p. 170).  Hovey was an American poet, one of whose works was "Taliesin: a Masque," first published in 1896.  The portion of Wright's library preserved in Oak Park contains Hovey's four-volume Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Dramas (inscribed by Wright in 1908)—the fourth volume of which is entitled "Taliesin: A Masque."

Howells, William Dean
In a letter to Charles Ashbee, 8 July 1910, Wright (in Fiesole, Italy) said, "I have read Howells, Ruskin, and Vasari on Florence" (Alofsin.1993, p. 53, p. 337 note 10).  "Howells" was presumably the novelist and literary critic William Dean Howells, who had written Tuscan Cities (Boston: Ticknor, 1886) and Italian Journey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896).  Wright may also have read Howells's recently-published utopian novel Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), the third book in his "Altrurian trilogy."  An 1891 editon of Tuscan Cities is in the collection of Wright’s books at Taliesin West.

Hubbard, Elbert
Wright's son John Lloyd Wright, speaking of the famous people who frequented the family's Oak Park home around 1900, included the author, publisher and artist Elbert Hubbard, recalling, "Elbert Hubbard was almost as picturesque as was Father––they talked arts, crafts and philosophy by the hour" (JLW, p. 32).  Wright was surely familiar with some of Hubbard's popular writings, which included A Message to Garcia (1899) and the multi-volume Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great (1895-1910.  

Hugo, Victor
In his autobiography, Wright referred to two of Hugo's works: Les Misérables (available in English translations in the 19th century, using the French title) and Notre-Dame de Paris (available in English translations usually titled The Hunchback of Notre Dame).  In describing his period as a university student in Madison, circa 1886, Wright included "Les Misérables" in a list of books he read at that time (Auto.1932, p. 52); regarding his first period in Chicago, circa 1887, he wrote, "Study classes at All Souls [the church he attended] were busy with Victor Hugo's Les Misérables under the guidance of the pastor," and he described a costume party in which he dressed as the book's character Enjolras (p. 75). 
  Wright said he then "remembered a chapter in Notre Dame, 'The Book Will Kill the Edifice,' [in which Hugo called the Renaissance] 'that setting sun all Europe mistook for dawn'"; and he found "a different translation" in the church library and "took it home and read [the chapter] again"; he then described Hugo's ideas and writing style, saying, "this essay was one of the truly great things ever written on architecture," and said he was "excited by the great poet into thinking about the difference between romanticism and sentimentality" (p. 77). 
  Wright often quoted Hugo's "setting sun" remark in his writings.  Later in his autobiography, regarding his life in Arizona, Wright said, "Victor Hugo wrote: 'The desert is where God is and Man is not'" (Auto.1932, p. 304).  In his 1901 lecture "The Art and Craft of the Machine," Wright said that he had read Hugo "as a boy": "The prophecy of Frollo [in Hugo's Notre Dame] that 'The book will kill the edifice' I remember was to me as a boy on eof the grandest sad things of the world" (CW, vol. I, p. 60). 
  In an essay Wright wrote in 1896, he quoted from Hugo: "Victor Hugo [said] that 'Art and Nature are two slopes of the same fact.' And that 'Art is the region of equals'" ("Architect, Architecture, and the Client," in CW, vol. 1, p. 28).   Olgivanna Wright, describing some of Wright's favorite authors, wrote in 1966, "Among the French novelists he read avidly were Victor Hugo, whom he often quoted, and Dumas" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  An 1897 edition of Les Misérables is among the books at Taliesin.

James, William
In A Testament (1957), Wright included William James in a list of "poets and philosophers" he had "read and respected" (Testament, p. 206).  Jerome Klinkowitz speaks of the similarity of some of Wright's ideas to those in James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) (Klinkowitz, p. 42).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of The Philosophy of William James, Selected Chief Works (1920).  And Wright's mother's library contained a copy of Varieties of Religious Experience––which may be the copy currently at Taliesin.

Jeanneret, Charles-Edouard
See Le Corbusier.

Jekyll, Gertrude
In his unpublished talk "Concerning Landscape Architecture," of 1900, Wright referred to the British garden designer and author Gertrude Jekyll: "A charming book by an English woman, Gertrude Jekyll, called Home and Garden, . . . should be in every library" (CW, vol. 1, p. 56).  Jekyll's Home and Garden had just been published that year.

Johnson, Philip
Philip Johnson wrote the preface to the catalog for the MoMA's 1953 exhibition "Built in the USA: Post-War Architecture," which included several of Wright's recent buildings. Johnson's statement that "Every building in this book would look different if it had not been for the International Style" infuriated Wright when he saw it, as he stated in a letter to MoMA's director René d'Harnoncourt (Wright to d'Harnoncourt, 9 July 1953; Smith.2017, pp. 165-66).  Wright objected also to Arthur Drexler's text in the catalog (Smith.2017, pp 165-66).

Johnson, Samuel
In A Testament (1957), Wright included "Dr. Johnson" in a list of authors he had read and "learned from" (Testament, p. 206).

Jones, Owen
In his autobiography Wright refers twice to Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament (first published in 1856).  In his description of his time working for Joseph Lyman Silsbee in Chicago, circa 1887, he says he found the book in the library of All Souls Church. "I read the 'propositions' and felt the first five were dead right" (Auto.1932, p. 74).  Jones's propositions dealt mainly with principles of the decorative arts (e.g., Proposition 1: "The Decorative Arts arise from, and should properly be attendant upon, Architecture").
   In describing his hiring by Louis Sullivan in 1888, and the first group of drawings he made to show to him, Wright says that several of the drawings were re-workings of "onion-skin tracings of ornamental details I had made from Owen Jones, mostly Gothic," and that when he showed them to Sullivan and identified them as "improvised Gothic from Owen Jones," Sullivan said "Who is he?," to which Wright replied, "You know, The Grammar of Ornament" (Auto.1932, pp. 90-91).  (It seems most unlikely that Sullivan was not familiar with Jones's work.)

Keats, John
About 1895 Wright designed the title page of an edition of Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes (River Forest, Illinois: Auvergne Press, 1986) (Sweeney, item 22).  Wright no doubt had a copy of the book.  Wright's mother's library contained a volume of Keats's poems (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of the website).

Key, Ellen
Several of the Swedish feminist Ellen Key's writings, some in Swedish and some in German, were translated into English by Mamah Borthwick Cheney when she and Wright were in Europe in 1909, and then at Taliesin, and were then published. One of them, Love and Ethics (Chicago, 1912), was identified as "Authorized Translation from the Original [which was in German] of Ellen Key by Mamah Bouton Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright" (Sweeney, item 106).  Since Wright did not read German, he must have simply helped Borthwick with the English version.  Wright no doubt read her other translations of Key's work as well. 
  In 1953, Wright said to Lewis Mumford, "If you are going to write on Love and Marriage, glance at the translation of Ellen Key on the subject, done by Mamah Bouton Borthwick while at Taliesin" (FLW&LM, p. 237).  This probably refers to The Morality of Woman and Other Essays (Chicago, 1911), or The Woman Movement (New York & London, 1912).  Wright's mother's library contained a copy of The Woman Movenent (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of the website).

Kimball, Fiske
In 1928 Wright wrote a review of Kimball's new book American Architecture (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928); the review was published in the August 1928 issue of The Architectural Record (CW, vol. 1, p. 319).  Wright is critical of much of the book, but agrees with some of Kimball's positions, and it is clear that he read the book carefully.  Wright had discussed the book in his correspondence with Lewis Mumford in early 1928 (FLW&LM, p. 48) and had written a letter to Kimball about it (reprinted in FLW&LM, pp. 50-51).  Wright also referred to Kimball's ideas about American architecture, and criticized them, in his 1928 article "In the Cause of Architecture: Purely Personal" (CW, vol. 1, p. 257).

Kipling, Rudyard
On the drafting-room balcony of his Oak Park studio, Wright reportedly had a quotation from Kipling's McAndrew's Hymn: "Ye've left a glimmer still to cheer the man — the artifex that holds in spite o' knocks and scale o' friction waste an' slip.  An' by that light — now mark my word we'll build the perfect ship" (information from Lisa Schrenk, 2018).  And in his discussion of designing the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, in the second edition of his autobiography, Wright quoted Kipling's line, "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" (Auto.1943, p. 552).   The words are the opening line of Kipling's poem "The Ballad of East and West" (1889); they were so well known that Wright would no doubt have been familiar with them even if he hadn't read the poem.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Kipling's The Jungle Book (1950).  And Wright's mother's library contained copies of Kipling's The Seven Seas and Ballads.

Kitao Shigemasa
See Shunsho

Kropotkin, Peter
In Wright's list of authors that accompanied the Broadacre City model in 1935 (as well as the list of authors and books he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the revision of his autobiography in 1943), Wright included the Russian radical thinker Kropotkin (Reading Broadacre, pp. 16-17; Auto.1943, p. 561).  If he did read one of Kropotkin's books that were available in English, it likely would have been Memoirs of a Revolutionist or Modern Science and Anarchism.  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy (now lost) of Memoirs of a Revolutionist.

Ku Hung Ming
In his autobiography, Wright said that when he was in China, in 1918, he met with the Oxford-educated author Ku Hung Ming, explaining that Dr. Ku had written "several famous books––one, The Spirit of the Chinese People, I had read, which so impressed me that I determined to look him up when I arrived in Peking.  I had a chance to sit and learn from him" (Auto.1943, p. 531).  The Spirit of the Chinese People, one of Ku Hung Ming's English-language books, had been published in 1915.

Lao-tzu
Wright frequently referred to the ideas and "organic philosophy" of the ancient Chinese sage Lao-tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching.  In his lecture "In the Realm of Ideas," of 1930, he said, "Lao-tzu said two thousand five hundred years ago that the present was 'the ever-moving infinite that divides Yesterday from Tomorrow" (CW, vol. 2, p. 84).  And in The Natural House (1954, p. 220) he spoke of Lao-tzu's concept of "the interior space being the reality of the building"—and claimed that he had first learned of Lao-tzu when he was given Okakura Kakuzo's Book of Tea, in the 1920s. 
  Several scholars, however, have argued that Wright must have known of Lao-Tzu, and Okakura's book, much earlier than this.  The question is examined in Kevin Nute's Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (Nute, pp. 124-41).  In his references to Lao-Tzu, Wright used various spellings of the name (Laotze, Lao Tze, Laotse, Lao-tzu), spellings that had been used in different editions of Lao-Tzu's writings—which suggests that Wright had access to several of these editions. 
  Wright would often read from Lao-Tzu at Fellowship gatherings; for example, Priscilla Henken's diary of her time at Taliesin, noted for 24 January 1943: "Wright read from Chinese philosophers tonight––Kung Fu Tse (Confucius), Cheng Sui, and Laotse, the great Chinese spiritual leader, equivalent of Jesus" (Henken, p. 109).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains two copies of Lao Tzu's work: one entitled The Way of Life (1955), the other The Wisdom of Laotse (1948).

Lardner, Ring
Wright included the satirical short-story writer Ring Lardner among the contemporary authors whose works were read at the evening gatherings of the Taliesin Fellowship (Auto.1932, p. 258).  And in his 1932 article "Books that have meant most to me," he included Lardner in a list of contemporary writers he enjoyed reading (Bks.1932, p. 64).

Lea, Homer
In speaking of Japan's military preparations before World War II, in his autobiography, Wright referred to the geo-political writer Homer Lea (1876-1912) as the "one intelligent mind" who foresaw the danger; "His books 'The Valor of Ignorance' and 'The Day of the Saxons' . . . should have had the attention which they failed to receive" (Auto.1943, pp. 523-24).  These two works by Lea were published in 1909 and 1912, respectively. 

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret)
Wright reviewed Towards a New Architecture (New York: Brewer and Warren, 1927), the English translation of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, in the journal World Unity Magazine, vol. II, September 1928, pp. 393-95 (reprinted in CW, vol. I, pp. 317-18).  The article is largely a critique of Le Corbusier's designs, but its references to the author's ideas and his terminology, such as the effects of "surface and mass," reveal that Wright read the text of the book.  When he quotes Le Corbusier as saying "Styles are no more than the feather in madam's hat," he is paraphrasing, not precisely quoting, a line in the book (p. 27). 
  Despite Wright's criticisms of Le Corbusier, he said, "But I wish everyone [in the U. S.] would read [this] book"—perhaps because of his conviction that European modernism was based in large measure on his own early work ("So welcome, Holland, Germany, Austria and France—what you take from us we receive from you gratefully").  For Wright's reactions to Le Corbusier's book, see Levine.2015, pp. 157-58.

Lesage, Alain-René
In describing Louis Sullivan's genius, in an article of 1924, Wright compared him to several artists and literary characters of the past, saying that in comparison to him, "Gil Blas [was] a torn chapeau" ("Louis Henry Sullivan: His Work," in CW, vol. 1, p. 199).  While this is not evidence that Wright had actually read Alain-René Lesage's novel Gil Blas, it indicates that he had enough familiarity with the work to know who the character Gil Blas was.

Lippmann, Walter
In a 1941 exchange with the editor of the Madison, Wisconsin Capitol Times, defending his anti-war isolationism, Wright wrote, "Our provincial columnists and wise-crackers: MacLeish, Sherwood, Max Anderson, Walter Lippmann, and Dolly Thompson, et al., may be included in this egotistic provincial exaggeration" ("Good Afternoon, Editor Evjue," CW, vol. 4, pp. 79-80).  MacLeish (Archibald MacLeish), Sherwood (probably Robert E. Sherwood), Max Anderson (Maxwell Anderson), Walter Lippmann, and "Dolly" (Dorothy) Thompson were all popular authors, journalists, and commenters on contemporary affairs at this time.  Wright's criticism of them indicates that he was familiar with their views, either from reading their newspaper columns or books, or in other ways.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
In his autobiography, Wright named Longfellow among the authors that his mother read to him as a child, and that he and his boyhood friend Robie Lamp later read together (Auto.1932, pp. 14, 31).  An 1886 copy of Longfellow's The Wreck of the Hesperus is among the books at Taliesin.

Lowell, James Russell
Wright included poet Lowell among the authors his mother read to him as a child (Auto.1932, p. 14).  At the time of her death, in 1923, her library contained a book of Lowell's poems (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website).

Lutyens, Sir Edwin
In 1951 Wright wrote a review of a monograph that had just appeared, The Lutyens Memorial: The Architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens. (This three-volume work is among the surviving books of Wright library at Taliesin West.)  Wright's review, which was largely favorable to Lutyens's work, had been solicited by the editor of Builder magazine, but was not published (CW, vol. 5, pp. 40-41).

Maclaren, Ian
In 1937, after recovering from a severe illness, Wright wrote a brief essay, "The Country Doctor," in appreciation of the good medical care he received.  In it, he said, "I hope all of you have read Ian McLaren's [sic] tribute to 'the doctor of the old school," adding that "Alex Woollcott includes it in his new 'reader'" (CW, vol. 3, p. 209).  Ian Maclaren (pseudonym of Rev. John Watson) was a Scottish author, one of whose fictional works was A Doctor of the Old School (first published 1895); it was included in The Woollcott Reader (1935), an anthology of writings that Wright's friend Alexander Woollcott recommended to his readership.

MacLeish, Archibald
See Walter Lippmann

Manson, Grant
In June 1953, Wright wrote to the architectural historian Grant Manson about an article of his that was about to appear in Architectural Review (of which an advance copy had been sent to him), regarding the Froebel kindergarten education that Wright had experienced as a child ("Wright in the Nursery: The Influence of Froebel Education on the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright," Architectural Review, June 1953, pp. 349-51).  Wright praised the article, telling Manson that it "fascinates and pleases me because somehow you did get to the source of my mother's contact with Froebel, which I never knew, and you are perfectly right regarding the formative power and direction the 'kindergarten' gave my instincts and could beyond all else give children if properly applied"  (Letters/Archts, pp. 114-15). But he questioned the validity of making "direct comparisons of [the Froebel exercises] with ultimate buildings."  And he said he was enclosing an article by "Professor Tselos" (see the entry on Dimitri Tselos).

Marx, Karl
Speaking of socialism in a speech of 1939, Wright said, I have read Henry George, Kropotkin, Gesell, Prudhome [sic], Marx, [etc.]" ("Speech to the A. F. A.," CW, vol. 3, p. 297).  And in the chapter on Broadacre City that he added to his autobiography in 1943, he mentioned several reasons why "Karl Marx never appealed to me" (CW, vol. 4, pp. 243-44).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a 1906 edition of Marx's Capital and did contain a copy (now lost) of "Manifesto of the Communist Party."

Mazzini, Giuseppe
Mentioning the thinkers who had influenced his ideas about Broadacre City, Wright in 1943 wrote, "Well along in the young practices of Architecture I met Mazzini, Meredith, Tolstoi, Whitman and the great humanitarians" ("An Autobiography, Book Six: Broadacre City," CW, vol. 4, p. 243).  He had also included Mazzini in the list of authors that accompanied the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935 (Reading Broadacre, p. 17).  "Mazzini" must be the 19th-century Italian revolutionary and political theorist Giuseppe Mazzini, whose books in English included On Nationality (1852) and The Duties of Man and Other Essays (1860).

Melville, Herman
In a letter to Lewis Mumford in 1929, Wright said that he had been reading Mumford's new book Herman Melville, as well as Melville's Moby Dick (FLW&LM, p. 79).  And Wright included Melville in his list of authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561). 
  The architectural historian James F. O’Gorman has written an essay, “Wright and Melville’s Chimney,” in which he draws parallels between Wright’s Prairie Houses and a story Melville published in 1856, “I and My Chimney” (Putnam’s Monthly, March 1856); while not saying that Wright was directly influenced by this story, O’Gorman argues that it epitomized ideas about domestic life that were common in 19th-century America––such as the significance of the fireplace in the center of a house––which did contribute to Wright’s Prairie House concepts.  (“Wright and Melville’s Chimney,” in Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O’Gorman, eds., American Architects and Their Books, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007, pp 257-63.)

Meredith, George
Wright often referred to the English Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith, and quoted or paraphrased from him several times.  In his 1917 essay on the Japanese print he wrote, "Meridith said we might be rebels against laws but that if we were for nature we were never lawless" ("The Print and the Renaissance," in CW, vol. 1, p. 152).  In a 1924 tribute to Louis Sullivan, he wrote, "Meredith's portrait of Beethoven––'The hand of the Wind was in his hair––he seemed to hear with his eyes,' is a portrait I have never forgotten'" ("Louis Henry Sullivan, Beloved Master," CW, vol. 1, p. 194).  In his autobiography he repeated this line, as well as: "'Speed,' as Meredith says, 'is a kind of voracity'" (Auto.1943, pp. 423, 502). 
  Wright included Meredith as one of the authors whom he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of the autobiography (p. 561).  In his 1932 article on the books that had meant the most to him, he said, "In early manhood I was a Meredithian to the bone for years––am yet" (CW, vol. 3, p. 63).  And in his 1943 essay on Broadacre City, in a passage titled "Mammon's Wife," he noted that the term was used by Meredith to refer to England (CW, vol. 4, p. 248).  "Mammon's wife" is indeed used in this sense in Meredith's poem "Aneurin's Harp," which was included in Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887), as well as other collections of Meredith's poems. 
  Olgivanna Wright's library contains thirteen of Meredith's novels, published 1921-31 (see the "Olgivanna Wright's books" section of this website).  And Wright's mother's library contained an edition of Meredith's short stories.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent
Wright included Millay among the contemporary writers he enjoyed reading, in his article "Books that have meant most to me" (Bks.1932, p. 64)—and, later, among the authors whose works were read at the evening gatherings of the Taliesin Fellowship (Auto.1943, p. 260).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy (now lost) of the "Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay."

Milton, John
Wright included Milton in the list of authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained two editions (now lost) of Milton's works, "Paradise Lost" and "Complete Poems."

Monroe, Harriet
In 1907, author and cultural critic Harriet Monroe wrote a review of the exhibit of Wright's works that was held at the Art Institute of Chicago.  ("In the Galleries," Chicago Examiner, 13 April 1907; section on Wright reprinted in Brooks.1981, pp 111-13.)  In it she praised the "creative force" of some of Wright's suburban houses but criticized the starkness of his public buildings, "massive and weighty, without grace or ease or monumental beauty." 
  Wright replied, in a long letter to Monroe, defending his work (Wright to Monroe, ca 18 April 1907, letter in Harriet Monroe Poetry Collection, University of Chicago Library; quoted in Robert C. Twombly, Frank Lloyd Wright, An Interpretive Biography, New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 84, 94-95, 317 n. 24, 318, n. 11).  In 1914 there was another, friendlier exchange between Wright and Monroe, over an article she had written on his work ("The Orient, an influence on the architecture of Wright," Chicago Tribune, 12 April 1914).  See Smith.2017, pp. 24-25, 36.

Morris, William
Wright referred to the ideas of Morris frequently in his early writings (especially in "The Art and Craft of the Machine" and the "In the Cause of Architecture" essays), but the references are rather general and no specific writings by Morris are mentioned (CW, vol. 1, pp. 25, 59, 61, 64, 65, 66, 108, 209, 211, 230, 308).  In his autobiography he does recall reading "Morris's 'Sigurd the Volsung'" as a young man (Au.1932, p. 52).  And in A Testament, of 1957, he wrote, "The 'tree dry' was William Morris's withering symbol for jealousy or hatred. To this day it is so for me" (Testament, p. 109).  Wright's mother's library contained a copy of the poetical works of Morris (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of the website).

Morrison, Hugh
In 1935 Wright wrote a damning review of Morrison's Louis Sullivan: Prophet of Modern Architecture, which was published in The Saturday Review, 14 December 1935 (CW, vol. 3, pp. 187-88).  Wright was critical especially of Morrison's lack of acknowledgment of Dankmar Adler's important role in the Adler and Sullivan firm, and of Adler's mentorship of the young Sullivan.

Morse, Edward
Scholars who have studied Wright's interest in Japanese art and architecture, and his visits to Japan starting in 1905, have concluded that he must have been familiar with Edward Morse's Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1886).  See, for example, Kevin Nute's Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, which includes parallels between Morse's and Wright's descriptions of Japanese architecture (Nute, pp. 36-46, 171-2).

Moses, Robert
In 1944 Robert Moses, park commissioner of the City of New York, wrote an article for the New York Times that was critical of Wright's Broadacre City plan.  Wright replied with a rebuttal, attacking Moses's advocacy of increased urban density, calling him "Robert Moses the Mole" for his "mole's-eye" view of planning ("To the Mole," in CW, vol. 4, pp. 264-68).  (Moses had called Wright an unrealistic "skylark").  Regarding the term "mole," see the entry here on Schopenhauer.

Mullgardt, Louis Christian
The American architect Louis Christian Mullgardt, visiting Japan in 1922, wrote a damning article on Wright's just-completed Imperial Hotel in Tokyo ("A Building that is Wrong," Architect & Engineer, Nov. 1922, pp. 81-89).  According to David Michael Hertz, Wright responded angrily, in two unpublished drafts of "In the Cause of Architecture," accusing Mullgardt of "trade assassination" and belittling one of Mullgardt's own buildings––drafts that Wright deleted from the published version of "In the Cause of Architecture" (David Michael Hertz, Frank Lloyd Wright in Word and Form [New York: G. K. Hall, 1995], pp. 56-57, 154 nn. 47, 48).  According to Hertz, the drafts are in the John Lloyd Wright Collection, Avery Library. They are not included in the Collected Writings of Wright.

Mumford, Lewis
Wright and Mumford had a long and lively intellectual relationship, mostly through correspondence, beginning when the architect wrote to the author in 1926, complimenting him on his article "The Poison of Good Taste," which had just appeared in The American Mercury (FLW&LM, p. 43).  Over the next thirty-two years their letters reveal that Wright read much of Mumford's prolific literary output, with Wright commenting specifically on the books Sticks and Stones (1924), The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (1926), Herman Melville (1929), The Brown Decades (1931), Technics and Civilization (1934) and Man As Interpreter (1951), as well as many of Mumford's essays and articles in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other journals (FLW&LM, pp. 43, 69, 73, 79, 92, 97, 117, 153, 162, 164, 174, 196, 233, 242, 244, 245, 253, 269). 
  At times Wright disagreed strongly with Mumford's views; in 1941, for example, he wrote a rebuttal to Mumford's just-published book The South in Architecture, based on lectures Mumford had given in Alabama ("Mumford Lectures," The Saturday Review, 13 August 1941, in CW, vol. 4, pp. 97-99).  Two of Mumford's books are in Wright's surviving library at Taliesin West: Sticks and Stones (1955) and Green Memories (1947), inscribed to Wright by Mumford.

Nehru, Jawaharlal
Wright included Nehru in the list of authors and historical figures he had "consulted" or "remembered" in writing his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  According to Priscilla Henken's diary of her time at Taliesin in 1942, on November 27, "Wright read from Nehru's Glimpses of World History at tea" (Henken, p. 72).  Nehru's book had just been published that year.  A copy of the 1942 edition is among the books at Taliesin.

Nietzsche, Friedrich
Recalling his meeting with Kuno Francke, about 1909, Wright said, "I had always loved Germany—Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Bach" (Auto.1932, p. 164).  And he included Nietsche in the list titled "Required reading for students of Broadacre City" in the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935 (Reading Broadacre, pp. 16-17).  He also included Nietzsche among the authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561). Olgivanna Wright's library contains books entitled The Living Thoughts of Nietzsche (1939) and The Philosophy of Nietzsche (1954).

North, Arthur Tappan
See Raymond Hood.

O. Henry
See William Sydney Porter.

Okakura Kakuzo
Okakura, the most prominent Japanese promoter of traditional Japanese culture in the late 19th century, wrote the official exhibition booklet describing the Ho-o-den pavilions at the 1893 Chicago fair (The Hō-ō-den, Tokyo, 1891).  According to Kevin Nute's Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, Wright was "likely familiar with this booklet," and surely knew Okakura's influential Book of Tea (Boston: Fox Duffield, 1906).  Nute believes that Wright also knew of Okakura's earlier book, The Ideals of the East (London: John Murray, 1903).  See Nute, pp. 49-51, 122-37; and Levine.1996, pp. 189, 461 n. 81.  See also the entry here on Lao-Tzu.

Onderdonk, Francis S.
In a letter to his apprentice Werner Moser, of 25 July 1929, Wright said he had seen the work of Moser's father (the Swiss architect Karl Moser) in Onderdonk's book on reinforced concrete (Joncas, p. 145).  This would have been Francis S. Onderdonk's The Ferro-Concrete Style: Reinforced Concrete in Modern Architecture (New York, 1928).  The book illustrated and described Karl Moser's St. Antonius Church in Basel.  A copy of the book is in Wright's surviving library at Taliesin West.

Ouspensky, Pyotr Demianovich
P. D. Ouspensky was an early disciple of the mystic Gurdjieff and the main promoter of his doctrines. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, an ardent follower of Gurdjieff, had several copies of Ouspensky's writings, including Tertium Organum (published 1922), A New Model of the Universe (1931), and In Search of the Miraculous (1949).
In 1949 Wright began a series of talks on Gurdjieff to his Fellowship apprentices, and in one of them, of 9 March 1952, he said that Ouspensky's writings about Gurdjieff's ideas were more "understandable" than those of Gurdjieff himself. (Transcript provided to me by Indira Berndtson, January 2021.) Wright was probably referring to Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, which was his main promulgation of the master's doctrines. See also Gurdjieff.

Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim)
Wright's The Living City (1958) is prefaced with a lengthy quotation (beginning "The internal character of a man is often expressed in his exterior appearance"), from the 16th-century German physician and philosopher Paracelsus (CW, vol. 5, p. 252).  The excerpt appears to be from Paracelsus's De Natura Rerum, which would have been available to Wright in a number of English editions of Paracelsus's works. Olgivanna Wright's library contained four books (now lost) of the writings of Paracelsus.

Parker, Dorothy
In 1945 Wright wrote a review, or a rebuttal, to an article Dorothy Parker had written for Ladies' Home Journal (December 1945), in which she criticized comments Wright had made about the "undemocratic" nature of the architecture of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (CW, vol. 5, pp. 277-80).  Wright's article was not published.

Parker, Theodore
Wright included the Transcendentalist reformer Theodore Parker among the authors whose books his mother provided for him in his childhood (Auto.1932, p. 15).

Paul, Jean
See Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich.

Pegler, Westbrook
Wright included the journalist Pegler among the contemporary American authors he enjoyed reading, in his 1932 article "Books that have meant most to me" (Bks.1932, p. 64).

Phillips, Harry Irving
In his article "A Culture of Our Own" (1959), Wright wrote, "The uncommon man is extremely unpopular; as H. I. Phillips said, he "is now unconstitutional'" (CW, vol. 5, p. 347).  Phillips's books included The Foolish Question Book (1927), All-out Arlene (1943), and Private Purkey's Private Peace (1945).

Plato
In Wright's essay "The Japanese Print" (1912), he wrote, of the Japanese artist, "The forms, for instance, in the pine tree, the geometry that underlies the peculiar pine character of the tree—what Plato meant by the eternal idea—he knows familiarly" (CW, vol. I, p. 118).  And in the conversation between Wright and Baker Brownell, appended to their jointly-written Architecture and Modern Life (1937), in a discussion of the meaning of "structure," Wright said, "Plato's eternal 'idea of the thing' is still valid, so far as I can see.  I should say structure is what Plato meant by 'Eternal Idea'—the essential framework of reality" (CW, vol. 3, p. 336).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains three editions of the works of Plato.  Also see Socrates.

Plutarch
In his autobiography, Wright mentioned "[my] father's calf-bound copy of Plutarch's Lives" as one of the books he read while a student, about 1886-87 (Auto.1932, p. 52).  Later, he revealed that he had pawned this book (as well as "my father's Gibbon's Rome"), while a student at the University of Wisconsin, to get money to move to Chicago (Testament, p. 17).

Poe, Edgar Allan
Describing his childhood, in his autobiography, Wright recalled listening to his father practice reciting two of Poe's poems, "The Raven" and "The Bells," and Wright included several stanzas from them (Auto.1932, pp. 48-49).  In the second edition of the autobiography, the quoted portions from the poems were reduced somewhat; but a passage was added, later in the book, in which Wright compared poetry and visual design, and said that Poe came close to combining the "abstract pattern" of both art forms (Auto.1943, p. 442). 
  A four-volume edition of Poe's works is in the collection of Wright's books in Oak Park, inscribed "Frank Lloyd Wright, Oak Park, Xmas 1907" (Family Library, p. 5).  And a 1912 edition of The Bells and Other Poems is in Wright's library at Taliesin West.

Porter, William Sydney (O. Henry)
According to Olgivanna Lloyd Wright's 1966 book on Wright, one of his favorite American authors was the short-story master O. Henry (pen-name of William Sydney Porter): "Among his best-loved humorists were Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Thurber. . . .  It was in The Four Million that he thought O. Henry best reflected his times, touched with sadness, a mixture of tenderness and tragedy" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  The Four Million, first published in 1906, was a collection of twenty-five of O. Henry's stories.  Another collection of them, Whirligigs, is among the group of Wright's surviving books at Taliesin West.

Pound, Ezra
According to Kathryn Smith, Wright had correspondence with Ezra Pound, during the poet's incarceration in Washington after World War II, in which Wright said he was familiar with Pound's work (e-mail from Smith to me, June 2019).

Prudhomme, Louis-Marie
In a discussion of political theories, in a speech in 1939, Wright said, "I have read Henry George, Kropotkin, Gesell, Prudhome [sic], Marx, Mazzini, [etc.]" ("Speech to the A. F. A.," CW, vol. 3, p. 297).  "Prudhome" is presumably Louis-Marie Prudhomme, the journalist and political writer of the French-Revolutionary period.  [I haven't been able to find any English-language editions of Prudhomme's writings that would have been available to Wright.  Could Wright possibly have been referring to the poet Sully Prudhomme?  This seems unlikely.]

Pushkin, Alexander
See Dostoevsky.
Olgivanna Wright's library contains an edition of Pushkin's Three Tales (1945) and did contain other Pushkin works (now lost).

Pythagoras
In his list of authors and historical figures he said he "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography, Wright included Pythagoras (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a book entitled The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, published in 1925.

Rabelais, François
In his article on the books that meant the most to him, for his "early manhood" years, Wright said, "Rabelais came along about that time" (Bks.1932, p. 63).  Rabelais's best-known work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, was available in several English editions.  According to Priscilla Henken's diary of her time at Taliesin in 1942, in the evening of November 29, Wright asked his apprentices what they would like to do, and one of them "suggested that he read from Rabelais, the description of the building and personnel of Pantagruel's Abbaye.  Amusing at first, but it wore on tediously toward eleven" (Henken, p. 75).

Rand, Ayn
Ayn Rand attempted, unsuccessfully, to meet and interview Wright when she was writing The Fountainhead, and she sent him a copy of the book when it was published in 1943. In April of 1944, after visiting Los Angeles with his daughter Catherine, Wright wrote to her, "I've read the Rand novel. It is a novel, and the thesis is the great one today—the Individual Conscience made free (not trammeled) by government as the only norm of the great Society. Sensationalized? Of course. But what is a great novel anyway?" (letter of 23 April 1944; information from Kathryn Smith, July 2019). 
  According to Rand biographer Barbara Branden, Wright wrote to Rand about the book: "When Wright read The Fountainhead, he wrote Ayn, 'I've read every word of The Fountainhead.  Your thesis is the great one. . . Your grasp [of] the ins and outs of a degenerate profession astonishes me. . . Your novel is Novel.'  [Rand] learned later that he kept the book on his night table at Taliesin, and that, at his suggestion, almost every student in his architectural school had read it" (Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand, New York, Doubleday, 1986, p. 190; no sources given for the information).

Remarque, Erich Maria
Wright mentioned to Darwin Martin, in a letter of 24 August 1929, that he was reading "All Quiet on the Western Front" (Joncas, p. 148).  Remarque's popular novel had just appeared in English translation.

Rice, Norman N.
In 1932, Wright wrote to the Philadelphia architect and educator Norman N. Rice, regarding an article of his on modern architecture, saying, "Your article in the T.Square Club was so well written and your point so well taken that I felt impelled to send you the enclosed" (letter included in FLW&LM, p. 138).

Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich (Jean Paul)
In a letter of 24 December 1901 to Mrs. Sophia Austin Morris, Wright said he would return to her a book by Jean Paul that he identified as "fruit, flowers and thorns."  The German author Johann Richter, using the pen-name Jean Paul, published in 1796 an eccentric novel with a long title that was rendered in the English edition of 1876 as Flower, fruit and thorn pieces; or the married life, death, and wedding of Siebenkas, poor man's lawyer (Boston: W. Osgood Smith, 1876). 
  In his letter, Wright spoke of the book in detail, saying, in part, "I have read him... and have read him again... charmed and sunned by his genial humor... [but] building up grandly until he crashes the universe in fragments... and we look, shuddering, into a godless chaos... I am richer and happier for having read your book."  (Information from Kathryn Smith, June 2019.)

Rolland, Romain
In a talk in 1918, Wright referred to several great artists and writers, saying that they embodied "the ideal of the creative artist reared by Romain Rolland in Jean-Cristophe" ("Chicago Culture," CW, vol. 1, p. 156).  The French author Romain Rolland's most popular work was the 10-volume Jean-Cristophe, originally published beginning in 1904 (English editions of the installments were produced by 1910). 
  In 1915, Wright had arranged for the publication of an article on Romain Rolland by the Swedish author Ellen Key, in a translation that had been made by Mamah Borthwick (Little Review, II, October 1915).  In 1918 Wright gave a three-volume edition of Jean Christophe to Louis Sullivan; Sullivan wrote to him, "The three volumes of Jean Christophe arrived last evening.  Thank you for sending them." (Letters/Archts, p. 6).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
In the "Book Six" addition to his autobiography, speaking of his youth when he was "about fourteen years old," he said, "At that time I read Rousseau's Emile, and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus among other things" (CW, vol. 4, p. 242).  (Rousseau's Émile, ou de l'éducation, of 1762, existed in English editions by this time.)  In A Testament (1957), Wright included Rousseau in a list of authors he had read and "learned from" (Testament, p. 206).  A two-volume edition of The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau is in the portion of Wright's library preserved in Oak Park.

Ruskin, John
In his autobiography Wright refers to having read several books by Ruskin in his early years.  Describing his school years in Madison, circa 1880, he said he read books with his friend Robie Lamp, including "Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, a gift from the Aunts Nell and Jane" (Auto.1932, p. 31); and for the period when he was attending the University of Wisconsin, circa 1886, he said he read "Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, Modern Painters, Stones of Venice (gift of Aunt Nell and Jane)" (Auto.1932, p. 52). 
  Wright referred to Ruskin's ideas in many of his writings, for example in "The Art and Craft of the Machine," 1901 (CW, vol. 1, pp. 59, 64, 66); in the Ausgefürte Bauten..., 1910 (CW, vol. 1, p. 108); "In the Cause of Architecture: The Third Dimension," 1925 (CW, vol. 1, p. 209); "The Frozen Fountain," 1932 (CW, vol. 3, p. 68); A Testament, 1957 (CW, vol. 5, pp. 158, 186); and many others. 
  Wright's surviving library contains Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Poetry of Architecture, but it is not known when he acquired these two books.  A list of books owned by his mother includes Ruskin's "The Crown of Wild Olives, "Ethics of the Dust," "Little Masterpieces," and "Sesame and Lillies" (see the "Anna Wright's books" section of this website).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains an 1873 edition of Ruskin's Poetry of Architecture, which no doubt had belonged to Wright.

Samonà, Giuseppe
In 1951 the Italian architect Giuseppe Samonà published an essay on Wright's work in the journal Metron, in conjunction with the opening of the Wright exhibition in Florence ("Sull'architettura di Frank Lloyd Wright," Metron, May 1951, pp. 34-43).  The following March, Wright wrote to Samonà, saying, "A competent English translation of your extraordinary criticism of my work has just reached me.  I have enjoyed for the first time in my life comprehensive insight of the nature of that work"—and went on to discuss several details of Samonà's article (Letters/Archts, p. 191).  The English translation of the article, made by Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., was published in Architectural Yearbook in 1953, and reprinted as an introduction to Drawings for a Living Architecture (New York: Horizon Press, 1959).

Sandburg, Carl
Wright greatly enjoyed Carl Sandburg's writings, even before the two of them first met (reportedly in the mid-1920s) and began the close friendship that lasted until Wright's death.  In a letter to Louis Sullivan, of April 1923, Wright referred to Sandburg's "Rootabaga Stories," saying, "Man alive! There is poetry! I love these little indigenous poems" (Letters/Archts, p. 22). 
  In the second edition of his autobiography Wright recalled that in the early days of his relationship with Olgivanna, "I read her to sleep with Carl's fairy tale of The White Horse Girl and The Blue Wind Boy. . . . I had just discovered the "Rootabaga Stories" and they delighted me so much I wrote him a little letter."  Wright included this letter in the autobiography; it begins, "Dear Carl: I read your fairy tales nearly every night before I go to bed.  They fill a long-felt want—Poetry" (Auto.1943, pp. 512, 514). 
  And Sandburg was one of the authors whose works were regularly read at the evening gatherings of the Taliesin Fellowship (Auto.1932, p 258).  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains two of Sandburg's books, inscribed to Wright by the author.  For the Sandburg-Wright friendship, see: Patrick J. Meehan, ed., "The Troubador and the Architect," Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Spring 1993, pp. 8-11.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Sandburg's Rutabaga Stories (1951), and did contain a copy (now lost) of The Sandburg Range.

Santayana, George
In the dialogue between Wright and Baker Brownell, included in their jointly-written book Architecture and Modern Life, Brownell at one point asked, "Then you agree with Santayana when he says that the spiritual life is the disintoxication from values?"—to which Wright replied, "No, I seldom agree with Santayana and do not now" (CW, vol. 3, p. 339).  Brownell was likely referring to Santayana's Platonism and the Spiritual Life (1927).

Schiller, Johann von
See Nietzsche.
Olgivanna Wright's library contains a 1902 edition of The Works of Friedrich Schiller, and did contain two other copies of works of Schiller, now lost.

Schopenhauer, Arthur
In a 1944 article attacking the city-planning practices of Robert Moses, whom he called "the Mole," Wright said, "Schopenhauer once did a valuable piece on the Mole.  I commend it at this point" (CW, vol. 4, p. 264).  The German philosopher did write about the mole, in his calls for compassion toward animals, arguing that even a creature as unattractive as a mole deserves compassion.  Wright must have had some familiarity with Schopenhauer's ideas.  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy (now lost) of Complete Essays of Schopenhauer.

Schuyler, Montgomery
In his second "In the Cause of Architecture" essay for The Architectural Record (1914), Wright said, "When, twenty-one years ago, I took my stand, alone in my field, the cause was unprofitable, seemingly impossible, almost unknown, or, if known, . .  . unhonored and ridiculed––Montgomery Schuyler was the one notable exception" (CW, vol. 1, p. 127).  Wright was no doubt familiar with Schuyler's writings in the 1890s favorable to the progressive trends in American architecture, including the work of Louis Sullivan, such as his two articles "Glimpses of western architecture––Chicago" (1891) and his book American Architecture Studies (1892). In 1912 Schuyler had written a review of Wright's Wasmuth portfolio of 1910, in which he praised the "organic qualities and power" of Wright's designs, but lamented their "stark" and "uncompleted" simplicity and lack of ornament (Architectural Record, April 1912, pp. 427-36; partly reprinted in Brooks.1981, pp. 119-21).  Despite this partially critical article, which Wright had surely read, he later mentioned Schuyler as one of the few architectural critics who "could be appreciated" (Testament, p. 205).  

Semper, Gottfried
Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., in his article "Frank Lloyd Wright and Gottfried Semper," described how Semper's architectural principles influenced the thinking of American architects in the late 19th century, especially in cities with strong Germanic components, such as Chicago—although "It seems doubtful that Wright knew about Semper directly" (Kaufmann, Nine Commentaries on Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, The Architectural History Foundation, 1989, p. 129).  However, Kenneth Frampton has written, "While neither Wright nor Sullivan made any reference to Semper, [they must have been] aware of his theory" (Frampton, "The Text-Tile Tectonic: The Origin and Evolution of Wright's Woven Architecture," in McCarter, p. 173).

Shakespeare, William
In A Testament (1957), Wright named great creative figures who had inspired him, and said, "Shakespeare was in my pocket for the many years I rode the morning train to Chicago" (Testament, pp. 205-06).  He often quoted Shakespeare in his writings, sometimes without attribution––for example, six lines from Measure for Measure ("Man, proud Man, Drest in a little brief authority . . ."); and when he spoke of his "enthusiasm for 'sermons in stones and books in running brooks,'" he was paraphrasing a line from As You Like It (The Living City, CW, vol. 5, p. 270; Testament, p. 205). 
  According to Meryle Secrest, this passage was Wright's mother's favorite quotation from Shakespeare (Secrest, p. 58; no source given).  In his autobiography, Wright included Shakespeare among the authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of the work (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Wright's surviving library at Taliesin West contains one Shakespeare play, a 1902 edition of Othello.  And his mother's library contained copies of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and The Merchant of Venice.

Shaw, George Bernard
In his 1933 article "In the Show Window at Macy's," Wright said, "It was Bernard Shaw who once said one might do anything if only one talked strongly enough the other way and one might say anything provided what one did was strongly enough the opposite" (CW, vol. 3, p. 148).  There is also a brief exchange about Shaw in the conversation between Wright and Baker Brownell, appended to Architecture and Modern Life, of 1937 (CW, vol. 3, p. 343).

Sheldon, George William
Patrick Pinnell has argued that Wright, while working for Louis Sullivan, must have known Sheldon's Artistic Country-Seats: Types of Recent American Villa and Cottage (New York: D. Appleton, 1887-88), a copy of which was in Sullivan's office (Pinnell, "Academic Tradition and the Individual Talent," in McCarter, pp. 29, 33).

Shelley, Percy Bysshe
In his autobiography Wright included Shelley as one of the authors he read, on his own, when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin, and that Shelley's poems were read at the evening gatherings of the Taliesin Fellowship (Auto.1932, pp. 52, 258).  In his 1932 article on the books that had meant the most to him, he said, "Shelley lifted me higher than was my wont in middle life" (Bks.1932, p. 63). 
  And in two of his writings (near the beginning and end of his career), Wright quoted from Shelley's essay "A Defence of Poetry."  In a discussion of creativity in "The Art and Craft of the Machine" (1901), he quoted a passage from the essay about the difficulty of understanding the poet's creative process (CW, vol. I, p. 68); and in his book A Testament (1957), he gave one section of the text the heading "POET––'Unacknowledged legislator of the world'," which is a paraphrase of the last sentence of Shelley's essay (Testament, p. 59).  (Passages brought to my attention by Richard Joncas.)  Wright's mother's library contained a book of Shelley's poetry, as well as the book With Shelley in Italy.

Sherwood, Robert E.
See Walter Lippmann

Shunsho, Katsukawa
Describing his love of Japanese art, in his autobiography, Wright referred to "the most exquisite piece of illustrated magazine making in this world—a graphic journalistic report by Shunsho and Shigemasa called 'Beauties of the Little Green Houses'" (Auto.1932, p. 212).  Katsukawa Shunsho and Kitao Shigemasa's Mirror of Competing Beauties of the Green House was produced about 1776.

Socrates
Wright included Socrates in his list of figures he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains several editions of the works of Plato—whose "Dialogues" provide the main account of Socrates' teachings.

Spencer, Herbert
In his autobiography Wright recalled that when he was working for Louis Sullivan, Sullivan was an admirer of Spencer's writings, and that "Spencer's 'Synthetic Philosophy' he gave to me to take home and read" (Auto.1932, p 102).  In a later recollection of his time with Sullivan, he repeated that Sullivan had given him Spencer to read, and added, "I read enough to show me the color of the particular tub of dye that was the Spencerian synthetic philosophy and threw the book away" (Genius and the Mobocracy, in CW, vol. 4, p. 359). 
  Historians, however, have argued that Spencer's ideas were an important influence on Wright.  For example, regarding Spencer's theory of the growth of crystals and organisms, Peter Collins said, "It was Spencer's biological works which mainly influenced Frank Lloyd Wright" (Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture, 1750-1950, London, Faber & Faber, 1967, p. 151).  And John Sergeant has written, "Wright's inclination to look for unity in nature was confirmed for him by the writings of Herbert Spencer" (Sergeant, "Wright's Usonian Houses," in McCarter, p. 192).

Spinoza, Baruch
Wright admired the pantheistic philosophy of Spinoza.  In a speech in San Francisco in 1933, he said, "We need the God of Spinoza. . . Spinoza's ideal of natural unity" (Paul V. Turner, Frank Lloyd Wright and San Francisco, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, p. 22).  And he included Spinoza in the list of "Required reading" accompanying the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935 (Reading Broadacre, pp. 16-17).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a book entitled Philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza (now lost).

Stein, Gertrude
In a letter to the architect George Howe, of February 1932, Wright showed that he was familiar with Gertrude Stein's repetitive, rhythmic writing style. Speaking of the biblical Moses, he said, "But if Moses . . . were merely ambious to be God he would have taken the commandments and à la Gertrude Stein say he could change 'thou shalt not steal' to read 'steal not shalt thou' or 'shalt not thou steal' or 'thou steal not shalt' etc. etc." (Letters/Archts, p. 94). Two years later, in 1934, Wright and his wife attended a talk Stein gave in Madison, Wisconsin, during her lecture tour of the United States.
  Olgivanna Wright later described this event, saying that she and Wright were in the audience, "listening to [Stein] reading from her works," and that they then met with Stein and Alice B. Toklas and invited them to visit Taliesin "to see how our young people would react to her writing as literature" (Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Our House, New York: Horizon Press, 1959, pp. 51-52). Stein and Toklas were not able to make the visit, although Wright pleaded with them to do so, according to Olgivanna. Wright frequently spoke of Stein in the following years. Priscilla Henken, in her diary of life at Taliesin in 1942-43, related that Wright described the 1934 meeting with Stein in Madison, and that he also said he had once met with her in Paris (Henken, pp. 50, 109).

Stephens, John Lloyd
Much has been written about the influence on Wright's work of pre-Columbian, especially Maya, architecture. In several of his books, Wright spoke of his admiration for the architecture of ancient Mexico and Central America, and in A Testament, he wrote, "I remember how, as a boy, primitive American architecture––Toltec, Mayan, Inca––stirred my wonder, excited my wishful admiration. I wished I might someday have money enough to go to Mexico, Guatemala and Peru to join in excavating those long slumbering remains of lost cultures . . ." (Testament, p. 111).
  Wright did not specify how he first knew of this pre-Columbian architecture, but it was likely through one of the books of John Lloyd Stephens (illustrated by Frederick Catherwood): Incidents of Travel in Central America (first published in London in 1842, with American editions in 1852, 1858, and later), and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (published in London in 1843, with American editions in 1843, 1848, 1858, 1860, and later). Wright might have seen a later book on Mexican and Central American architecture, Désiré Charnay's The Ancient Cities of the New World (London, 1887; New York, 1888), but Stephens and Catherwood's books were the most popular works on the subject available in the United States in the mid- and late 19th century.

Sullivan, Louis Henry
In his autobiography, Wright said that while he was working for Sullivan, Sullivan "had just written 'Inspiration' [an essay Sullivan published in 1886]. He read it to me.  I thought it a kind of baying at the moon.  Again too sentimental.  I never liked his writing in those early days" (Auto.1932, p. 102).  And describing Sullivan's final years, Wright said, "He was writing the 'Autobiography of an Idea' at this time.  Occasionally he would read chapters to me." The day before Sullivan died, in April 1924, Wright had an emotional last meeting with him. The first printed copy of the book had just arrived, and Sullivan tried to inscribe it to Wright but didn't have the strength. "He tried to raise his arm to take the pencil; he couldn't lift it. . . . And I have never read the book. All I know are the chapters he read to me himself. I could not read it." (Auto.1932, pp. 263-64). 
   Wright then wrote an article eulogizing him ("Louis Henry Sullivan: Beloved Master," published in The Western Architect, June 1924), and spoke glowingly of The Autobiography of an Idea (CW, vol. 1, p. 195).  But, despite the clear evidence that Wright was familiar with Sullivan's writings, at the end of the 1943 edition of Wright's autobiography, in a list of authors who had influenced him, he made the surprising statement, "Louis Sullivan's writings I have not read" (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Conceivably this may have been true, strictly speaking, if Wright knew the writings only from Sullivan's having read them to him.

Swift, Jonathan
Describing his boyhood reading, in his article on the books that had meant the most to him, Wright included Gulliver's Travels (Bks.1932, p. 63).  Olgivanna Wright's library contained a copy of Gulliver's Travels (now lost).

Tagore, Rabindranath
According to Wright's son John Lloyd Wright, the Indian author Rabindranath Tagore was among the visitors to Wright's Oak Park home in the first decade of the 20th century (JLW, p. 33).  It is unclear, however, whether any of Tagore's writings had been translated into English by this time.

Tallmadge, Thomas E.
In his article "Surface and Mass—Again!" in the July 1929 issue of Architectural Record, Wright continued his attack on the International Style and its American proponents, as well as critics who had maligned or under-appreciated him.  The article makes a cryptic reference to "Artificer Tallmadge . . . [who] said it was dead already, he understood, and fervently hoped it was" ("it" apparently being Wright's architectural revolution) (CW, vol. 1, pp. 324-25). 
  Thomas E. Tallmadge was a Chicago architect who also wrote articles and books on architecture; he had been critical of Wright (reportedly calling him a "has-been"), and in his just-published book The Story of Architecture in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1927) had included him in a chapter entitled "Louis Sullivan and the Lost Cause."  (For the "has-been" remark, see Brooks.1981, p. 147.)  Wright was surely familiar with Tallmadge's writings when he wrote his "Surface and Mass" article that referred to him.  Tallmadge later revised his disparaging opinions of both Sullivan and Wright, and the second edition of his book (1936) portrayed them much more favorably.

Tarkington, Booth
In a 1918 talk on "Chicago Culture" (published in On Architecture in 1920), Wright named many Midwestern literary figures; he did not indicate specifically if he had read them, except in the case of Tarkington, saying, "Booth Tarkington's work is a delight" (CW, vol. 1, p. 157).  His best-known book was probably The Magnificent Ambersons; it had just been published in 1918.

Tennyson, Alfred
In John Lloyd Wright's book about his father, he recalled that when he and his siblings were children their father would recite Tennyson's poem that begins "Flower in the crannied wall" (JLW, p. 28).  This poem, which was included in many of the collected editions of Tennyson's poetry, was a favorite of Wright's, and it inspired the sculpture of this name, which he and Richard Bock produced for the Susan Lawrence Dana House in Springfield, Illinois in 1903—as well as a version of the sculpture that Wright made for Taliesin.  Wright entitled one of his articles "For All May Raise the Flowers Now For All Have Got the Seed" (published in 1932) and ended the article with this “Flower in the crannied wall” line (CW, vol. 3, pp. 117-20).  The editor of the Collected Writings noted, "Wright has taken a slight liberty here with the fifth stanza of a poem entitled 'The Flower,' by Alfred Lord Tennyson . . ." (CW, vol. 3, p. 120, note 4).  Wright's mother's library contained a volume of Tennyson's poems.

Thompson, Dorothy
See Walter Lippmann

Thoreau, Henry David
Wright included Thoreau among the "transcendentalist" writers whose books his mother had him read, as a boy (Auto.1932, p. 15).  He referred to Thoreau frequently throughout his writing, and listed Thoreau as one of the authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561). 
  In the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum, which was devoted to Wright, and which he designed, the layout featured several quotations from Walt Whitman and two from Thoreau.  The first, at the beginning of the issue, is an extended excerpt from Chapter 1 of Walden, reading, in part: "True, there are architects—so called—in this country . . . possessed with the idea of making architectural ornaments have a core of truth. . . What architectural beauty I see I know was grown from within outward . . ." 
  The second Thoreau quotation begins, "How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experience of living?"  And in the "Book Six" addition to his autobiography, of 1943, Wright said, "Thoreau's 'That government is best government which governs not at all' I accepted as a truism"—revising Thoreau's actual words, in Civil Disobedience ("That government is best which governs least") (CW, vol. 4, p. 243).  For Thoreau's influence on Wright, see Naomi Tanabe Uechi, Evolving transcendentalism in literature and architecture, pp. 97-122 (see entry on Emerson for full citation).

Thurber, James
Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, in her 1966 book on Wright, listing some of his favorite authors, wrote, "Among his best-loved humorists were Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Thurber, whose stories he liked to read aloud to me" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  James Thurber's witty stories, such as "The Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," appeared mainly in The New Yorker, which is probably where Wright read them, since he regularly read this magazine.  A 1943 edition of Thurber's Men, Women and Dogs is among the books at Taliesin.

Tocqueville, Alexis de
In her biography of Wright, Meryle Secrest wrote, "When [Wright] was in his sixties and lecturing in New York before World War II, [the architect] Arthur Holden . . . asked how long it had been since Wright had read Alexis de Tocqueville's book Democracy in America, and mentioned a particular passage. As it happened, Wright had never heard of Tocqueville, but when they met again some months later, Holden learned that Wright had immediately gone out and bought the book, and could cite the particular passage almost by heart" (Secrest, pp. 87-88; source of information given as "Arthur Cort Holden to author"). Democracy in America was first published in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840.

Tolstoy, Leo
In his 1932 article on his favorite books, Wright said, "I have read with enthusiasm the great Russians . . . from Tolstoy and Gogol to Gorky [etc.]"; and later, speaking of his visit to the Soviet Union in 1937, he wrote, "At that time I knew Tolstoy, Turgenev, [etc.]" (Bks.1932, p. 64; Auto.1943, p. 556).  In an essay Wright wrote in 1896, he quoted several authors' definitions of art, including: "Tolstoy tells us that 'Art is the infection by one man of another with the feelings experienced by the infector." ("Architect, Architecture, and the Client," in CW, vol. 1, p. 27) 
  In his 1931 prospectus on the organization of his proposed "Hillside Home School of the Allied Arts," Wright recommended using one of Tolstoy's non-fiction books: "The entire work of feeding and caring for the student body . . . should be done by itself; Tolstoy's 'What to Do,' a textbook in this connection" (CW, vol. 3, p. 47).  There were several English translations of this Tolstoy work, with slightly different titles; the one titled What to Do? had been published in 1887.  
  And in his article "Wake Up America!," of 1940, Wright wrote, "Unhappy old Tolstoi wrote that present forms of government are inseparable from war" (CW, vol. 4, p. 41).  Olgivanna Wright, in her 1966 book on Wright, wrote, "He often spoke of Tolstoy as the best representative of his time and especially admired War and Peace and Resurrection.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains four English translations of Tolstoy's works.

Tselos, Dimitri
In 1953, Wright wrote a review of an article by the historian Dimitri Tselos, "Exotic Influences in the Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright," which had appeared in Magazine of Art.  Wright's review, entitled "Influence or Resemblance," denied the influences Tselos saw, saying, for example, "I did not see the preColumbian art at the Chicago World's Fair (1893) nor the Japanese building" (CW, vol. 5, pp. 70-71).  The review was not published.

Tugwell, Rexford
In a 1940 article on Broadacre City (published in Taliesin magazine), answering criticisms of the plan, Wright said, "The confident Mr. Rexford Tugwell thought the scheme carried horizontality too far . . ." ("The New Frontier: Broadacre City," in CW, vol. 4, p. 59).  The economist Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt's administration at this time, had written several books and articles on planning that may have commented on Wright's plans, such as Our economic society and its problems: a study of American levels of living and how to improve them (1934) and The Battle for Democracy (1935).

Turgenev, Ivan
See Dostoevsky.
Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Turgenev's The District Doctor and Other Stories (1951), and did contain other Turgenev works, now lost.

Twain, Mark
In A Testament (1957), in a list of American authors he had read, Wright included "Mark Twain, our supreme humorist-story-teller" (Testament, p. 206).  Olgivanna Wright, in her 1966 book on Wright, listing some of his favorite authors, wrote, "Among his best-loved humorists were Mark Twain, O. Henry, and Thurber" (OLW.1966, p. 140).  Olgivanna Wright's library contains twenty-one volumes of a set of The Complete Works of Mark Twain (Harper & Brothers, 1907-35) and several additional Twain editions.  See the Olgivanna Lloyd Wright Library section of this website.

Unamuno, Miguel de
In A Testament (1957), Wright included Unamuno among the authors who had inspired him (Testament, p. 206).  Wright's library contains Unamuno's major philosophical work, The Tragic Sense of Life (1912).

Vandercook, John W.
In a letter from Lloyd Wright to his father, of 14 May 1928, he asked for the return of a book he had lent to his father, John W. Vandercook's Black Majesty: the life of Christophe, King of Haiti (information from Kathryn Smith, June 2020). The book had been published earlier that year (New York: Harper & Bros, 1928).

Van Dyke, Henry
In John Lloyd Wright's book about his father, he mentions four authors who were "Papa's friends"—Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, and Henry van Dyke (JLW, p. 33).  Van Dyke's inspirational short stories, of the 1890s and early years of the 20th century, were popular in America at the time.  A list of books owned by Wright's mother includes van Dyke's "The Mansion."

Van Rensselaer, Mariana Griswold
Patrick Pinnell (in McCarter, pp. 28-29) states that Wright no doubt knew the first major book on H. H. Richardson, Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer's Henry Hobson Richardson & His Works (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1888).

Vasari, Giorgio
In a letter to Charles Ashbee, 8 July 1910, Wright (in Fiesole, Italy) said, "I have read Howells, Ruskin, and Vasari on Florence" (Alofsin.1993, p. 53).  This would be a reference to Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, available in several English-language editions.

Veblen, Thorstein
Wright included the critic of capitalism Thorstein Veblen in the list of authors that accompanied the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935 (Reading Broadacre, pp. 16-17).  And in a speech in 1936, Wright included him among "voices crying in the wilderness" ("An Architect Speaking for Culture," CW, vol. 3, p. 190).  Speaking of socialism in a speech of 1939, he said, I have read Henry George, Kropotkin, Gesell, Prudhome [sic], Marx, Mazzini, Whitman, Thoreau, Veblen and many other advocates of freedom" ("Speech to the A. F. A.," CW, vol. 3, p. 297). 
  Wright included Veblen in the list of authors who had influenced him in the revision of his autobiography in 1943 (Auto.1943, p. 561).  Wright would no doubt have read Veblen's best-known work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, first published in 1899.  For a comparison of Veblen's and Wright's ideas, see Lionel March, "An Architect in Search of Democracy," in Brooks.1981, pp. 198-99.

Verne, Jules
Wright included "Jules Verne's 'Michael Strogoff' [and] 'Hector Servadac'" among the books he and his boyhood friend Robie Lamp read together, circa 1880 (Auto.1932, p. 31).  These would have been new books at the time.  Michael Strogoff, The Courier of the Czar (the English translation of the French original) first appeared in 1877, and the first English edition of Hector Servadac appeared in 1878.  An 1894 edition of Michael Strogoff was at Taliesin at least until 1992.

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel
Wright mentions Viollet-le-Duc twice in his autobiography.  In listing the books he read while a student and working for Allen Conover in Madison, circa 1886, he includes "Viollet Le Duc's Raisonne D'architecture" (Auto.1932, p. 52; revised to "Viollet-le-Duc's Raisonné de l'architecture" in the 2nd edition).  While describing the time he worked for Lyman Silsbee in Chicago, circa 1887, he wrote, "From the library of All Souls [the church he attended at that time] I got... Viollet le Duc's Habitations of Man in All Ages.  I had read his Dictionnaire, the Raisonne, at home, got from the Madison city library.  The Raisonne was the only really sensible book on architecture in the world, I believed.  I got copies of it later for my sons.  That book was enough to keep one's faith in architecture" (Auto.1932, p. 74). 
  The Habitations of Man in all ages
, Benjamin Bucknall's translation of the original French work (Histoire de l’habitation humaine, depuis les temps préhistoriques jusqu’à nos jours, 1875), had been published in Boston in 1876, and would have been available to Wright.  But his claim of having read the "Dictionnaire, the Raisonne" must be mistaken.  Viollet-le-Duc's ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle had no English translation, and Wright probably did not read French well enough to read any part of the original (see the note on Wright's knowledge of foreign languages, in the Introduction to this website).  
  Wright was no doubt confusing the "Dictionnaire" with a different work by Viollet-le-Duc, his Entretiens sur l'architecture, which existed in two English translations: one by Henry Van Brunt (Discourses on Architecture, Boston, 1875, and later editions); the other by Benjamin Bucknall (Lectures on Architecture, London, 1881 and later editions).  This was Viollet-le-Duc's best-known work to the English-speaking public, and was widely read and admired by American architects at this time.  Wright would have been much more likely to find the Discourses, with its discussion of general principles, "the only really sensible book on architecture," than the Dictionnaire raisonné, which deals almost exclusively with French medieval architecture. 
  Moreover, his son John Lloyd Wright stated, in his biography of his father, that when he decided to become an architect himself, his father gave him Viollet-le-Duc's two-volume "Discourses on Architecture," which he had found in a New York bookstore.  John added that his father said, "In these volumes you will find all the architectural schooling you will ever need" (JLW, pp. 69, 136).  The historian Donald Hoffmann studied the question of which work of Viollet-le-Duc Wright read, as a youth, and found that the Madison public library had a copy of the Van Brunt edition of the Discourses at the time Wright was there (Hoffmann, "Frank Lloyd Wright and Viollet-le-Duc," JSAH, vol. 8, Oct. 1969, p. 174). 
  Later, Wright did acquire two sets of the Dictionnaire raisonné; his knowledge of this work may have led to his confusion of it with the Discourses on Architecture.  Near the end of his life, in 1957, Wright reportedly said that the only writers on architecture he had respected in his youth were Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc (Hoffmann, op.cit., p. 173, note 1).

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
Wright included Voltaire in the list titled "Required reading for students of Broadacre City" in the exhibition of the Broadacre City model in 1935 (Reading Broadacre, pp. 16-17).  He also included Voltaire among the authors he had "consulted" or "remembered" in the writing of his autobiography (Auto.1943, p. 561).  And in A Testament (1957), Wright included Voltaire in a list of authors he had read and "learned from" (Testament, p. 206).

Warren, Samuel Edward
One of Wright's earliest surviving drawings, apparently done for a drawing course when he attended the University of Wisconsin in 1885-86, is labeled "Shade & Shadow of a surface of Revolution, generated by the revolution of a Parabola about its axis" (Taliesin drawing no. 14001).  B. Koppany has suggested that this drawing may have been based on similar drawings in Samuel Edward Warren's General Problems of Shades and Shadows (New York: J. Wiley and Son, 1875 and later editions) (Koppany, vol. 3, pp. 808-09).  See also Albert E. Church.

Whistler, James McNeill
Wright referred to Whistler and quoted from him several times in his early writings.  In his 1896 lecture and article "Architect, Architecture, and the Client," he attributed to Whistler the line "Art is limited to the infinite and the beginning, and ending there cannot progress"; commenting on this lecture, the editor of the Collected Writings pointed out that this was a paraphrase from Whistler's "1885 'Ten O'Clock' address," and said, "A number of references in [Wright's] lecture make it clear that Wright was very familiar—and basically in agreement­­—with Whistler's . . . address" (CW, vol. 1, pp. 28, 38).  Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" address was included in his book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, first published in 1890.

Whitman, Walt
Wright's favorite author was no doubt Walt Whitman, and he referred to him throughout his writings.  In discussing the books that most influenced him "in early manhood," Wright said, "I became one of Walt Whitman's lovers about the same time" (Bks.1932, p. 63).  Speaking of the period when he worked for Louis Sullivan, about 1900, he said that Sullivan "adored Whitman, as I did" (Auto.1932, p. 102).  And he recalled that during his Oak Park years, he would ride his horse into the countryside and "read from a book usually carried in my pocket, for I've always loved to read out of doors—especially Whitman" (Auto.1932, p. 165).  In the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum, devoted to Wright's work, which Wright himself largely designed, he included many quotations from Whitman, including one placed next to Wright's iconic red square on the final page, beginning, "Chanting the square deific."­­ 
  People have often suggested that Whitman's style of writing influenced Wright's own writing—a point he himself acknowledged in a 1930 essay about the reception of his "In the Cause of Architecture" essays: "Critics have referred to the articles as 'poetic,' in the style of Walt Whitman'" ("In the Cause of Architecture: Confession," CW, vol. 1, p. 344). 
  Several quotations from Whitman are featured in the layout of the January 1938 issue of Architectural Forum devoted to Wright (which Wright designed).  In a 1941 essay, "To Beat the Enemy," Wright quoted Whitman's entire poem "To a President" (CW, vol. 4, p. 87).  And in A Testament, of 1957, Wright quoted Whitman several times, in one case giving a passage the title "Walt Whitman––Seer of Democracy" (CW, vol. 5, pp. 183, 197). 
  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains a copy of Leaves of Grass, but it is a copy that was given to him in 1938.  Wright clearly owned at least one copy of the book earlier in his life, and in this regard it is interesting that a collection of books that belonged to Catherine Wright includes an edition of Leaves of Grass inscribed "Catherine L. Wright, Oak Park, 1908." ("Books Owned by Catherine Wright," in Family Library, p. 8) 
  For discussions of Wright and Whitman, see: Naomi Uechi, Evolving Transformations, pp. 123-150 (see entry on Emerson for full citation); and Jeff Goodman, "Grand is the Seen," FLW Quarterly, vol. 27, Fall 2016, pp. 24-29.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Whitman's November Boughs (1888), with annotations that appear to be Wright's (see the "Olgivanna Wright's books" section of this website).  And Wright's mother's library contained a volume of Whitman's poems.

Whittier, John Greenleaf
In his autobiography, speaking of his childhood and his mother, Wright said, "When she read to her children . . . it was from Whittier, Lowell or Longfellow," and he said that later in his youth, the authors he read with his friend Robie Lamp included "Whittier, Longfellow, Bryant" (Auto.1932, pp. 14, 31).  Wright's mother's library contained a volume of Whittier's poems.

Wijdeveld, H. Th. (Hendricus Theodorus)
In 1925 the Dutch editor H. Th. Wijdeveld produced seven special issues of the magazine Wendingen devoted to Wright, which at the same time were bound together as a book: The Life-Work of the American Architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Santpoort, Holland: C. A. Mees, 1925); the work contains text by Wright himself, as well as articles by Wijdeveld, Lewis Mumford, H. P. Berlage, J. J. P. Oud, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Erich Mendelsohn, and Louis Sullivan.  Wright wrote to Wijdeveld in October 1925, confirming receipt of the work and saying it was "a pleasant thing to see," and he later reportedly said that it was his favorite publication on his work (A. Alofsin, Wright and New York, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019, p. 187; Letters/Archts, p. 57). 
  After Wright's death, Olgivanna Wright recounted his reaction to the Wendingen publication when it arrived at Taliesin in 1925, saying that he called Wijdeveld's preface "a fine piece of work" and said "Wijdeveld understands my architecture" (OLW.1966, p. 76).

Wilder, Thornton
According to Priscilla Henken, in the diary of her time at Taliesin, 1942-43, Wright saw Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth when he was on the East Coast at the beginning of 1942, and on his return to Taliesin mentioned that "he told Thornton Wilder he thought the play was excellent" (Henken, p. 130).

Woollcott, Alexander
Wright and Woollcott were close friends, from at least the 1920s, until Woollcott's death in 1943.  The essayist, theater critic, humorist, and commentator visited Taliesin frequently and was a favorite of Olgivanna's as well as of Wright.  In 1929 Wright wrote to him, reporting that he and Olgivanna had been reading Woollcott's new book Two Gentlemen and a Lady, and that "if the laughter provoked in our little family follows your book through the country, the ripple will be felt [in] New York City" (letter quoted in Secrest, p 347; cited as being in the "Eric Wright Archives"). 
  Wright was also familiar with Woollcott's 1935 anthology The Woollcott Reader (CW, vol. 3, p. 209).  Wright's library at Taliesin West contains another book by Woollcott, Going to Pieces (1928), inscribed to Wright by the author.  Olgivanna Wright's library contains a copy of Letters of Alexander Woollcott (1946) and did contain two copies (now lost) of Woollcott's Long, Long Ago.

Wordsworth, William
In A Testament (1957), Wright included Wordsworth in a list of authors who had inspired him (Testament, p. 206).  The collection of Wright's books in Oak Park contains a 1905 edition of Wordsworth's works, inscribed "Frank Lloyd Wright, Catherine L. Wright" (Family Library, p. 12).  And Wright's mother's library contained a volume of Wordsworth's poems.

Zevi, Bruno
Beginning in the early 1940s, the young Italian architect and author Bruno Zevi became a great admirer of Wright; he interviewed him, had a long-term correspondence with him, promoted his work in his writings, and helped organize the exhibition of Wright's work in Florence in 1951.  Although Zevi's publications were mostly in Italian, Wright was certainly familiar with his ideas.  His library contained a copy of Zevi's Saper vedere l'architettura, of 1951, which appeared in an English-language edition in 1957 as Architecture As Space (New York, Horizon Press, 1957).  See: FLW&LM, pp. 189, 196, 208, 267; Letters/Archts, pp. 116, 170, 184-85, 189, 199.

 

Abbreviations of sources referred to here (back to top)

Alofsin.1993: Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Lost Years, 1910-1922. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Alofsin.1999: Anthony Alofsin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Europe and Beyond. Berkeley: University of Calfornia Press, 1999.

Auto.1932: Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography. London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, 1932.

Auto.1943: Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943. (This second edition is a greatly revised and expanded version of the first edition.)    

Bks.1932: Frank Lloyd Wright, "Books that have meant most to me," Scholastic Magazine, September 1932; referred to here as reprinted in CW, vol. 3, pp. 63-64.

Brooks.1981: H. Allen Brooks, ed., Writings on Wright. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.

CW: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright, Collected Writings. 5 vols., New York: Rizzoli, 1992-95.

Family Library: Margaret Klinkow, The Wright Family Library. Oak Park, IL: Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation Research Center, 1994.

FLW&LM: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Robert Wojtowicz, eds., Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford, Thirty Years of Correspondence. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001.

Genius/Mob: Frank Lloyd Wright, Genius and the Mobocracy.  New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949.

Henken: Priscilla J. Henken, Taliesin Diary: A Year With Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012.

JLW: John Lloyd Wright, My Father Who is on Earth. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1946.

Joncas: Richard Joncas, "Frank Lloyd Wright Chronology."  Unpublished compilation, shared with PVT 2014.

JSAH: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Klinkowitz: Jerome Klinkowitz, Frank Lloyd Wright and His Manner of Thought. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

Koppany: B. Koppany III, Educating Frank Lloyd Wright, 1885-1899. 3 vols. Los Angeles: Striking Impressions, 2005.

Letters/Archts: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright, Letters to Architects, Fresno: California State University Press, 1984.

Levine.1996. Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Levine.2015. Neil Levine. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

McCarter: Robert McCarter, ed., On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles.  London & New York: Phaidon Press, 2005.

Nute: Kevin Nute, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan. London: Chapman & Hall, 1993.

OLW.1960. Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, The Shining Brow, Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Horizon Press, 1960.

OLW.1966: Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, His Life, His Work, His Words. New York: Horizon Press, 1966.  Cited here as reprinted in Brooks.1981.

FLW/Ideas: Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer and Gerald Nordland, Frank Lloyd Wright in the Realm of Ideas.  Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Reading Broadacre: Jennifer Gray, "Reading Broadacre," Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Winter 2018, pp. 16-17 and fig. 4.

Secrest: Meryle Secrest, Frank Lloyd Wright, A Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Smith.2017: Kathryn Smith, Wright on Exhibit.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Sweeney: Robert L. Sweeney, Frank Lloyd Wright, An Annotated Bibliography.  Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1978.

Testament: Frank Lloyd Wright, A Testament. New York: Horizon Press, 1957.