Master Of All He Surveyed

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TITLE: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

AUTHOR: MERYLE SECREST

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 634 PAGES; $30

THE BOTTOM LINE: Despite Secrest's sometimes trite prose, Wright's rich life makes compelling reading.

When a shop selling nothing but biographies opened in Greenwich Village in New York City a few years ago, it affirmed both a well-established truism (Manhattan is a bookwormy hothouse) and a brand new one: as this century winds down, the number of biographies manifestly exceeds the supply of deserving subjects. How much did the world need an account of the life of Elton John, let alone the two that were published this year?

On the other hand, there is Frank Lloyd Wright. He was born to be written about, an authentic genius who was both prolific and profoundly influential, his life packed with dramatic incident and grand gesture. Yet while there have been Wright biographies (including his own maundering, portentous, 1932 memoir), his life hasn't had the acute summation and assessment it deserves. While Meryle Secrest's Frank Lloyd Wright is highly imperfect -- her chats about his personality and architecture are trite almost without exception -- it is still the best so far, a huge and definitive accumulation of fact.

Wright's life-span alone is astonishing: his career extended from the beginning of the Gilded Age to the last days of the American Century, from the sod house to the shopping mall. Born in rural Wisconsin to a charming, feckless musician-preacher and a high-strung, single-minded mother -- they divorced when Frank was a teenager -- Wright was inculcated with an overweening sense of his talent and destiny. Anna Wright may have been the first atelier mother: she pushed him hard to become an architect when he was still a child, providing a special set of designer-in-training building blocks.

By the time Wright was 19 he was in Chicago working for Louis Sullivan, the most important American architect of the time. Hired as an $8-a-week draftsman, Wright asked for a 125% raise within a few months and quit when he was refused. Sullivan quickly capitulated and was soon paying him $60 a week, a preposterous sum for the time. All his life, no matter how much he made (and borrowed: friends and patrons lent him thousands of dollars at a whack), Wright felt poor, thanks to an unhesitatingly indulged taste for swank -- chamois underwear, high-performance sports cars, whatever was gorgeous and rare.

Despite the cosmopolite profligacy, he described his architecture as the embodiment of some vague Whitmanesque mission, earthy and populist and "organic." In fact, he did design an inordinate number of houses for an architect of his stature, and his best ones are married intricately and sublimely to their natural surroundings -- Fallingwater, one of his masterpieces, seems not so much erected as extruded out of a stony patch of Pennsylvania forest.