Amazon Significant Seven, August 2007: It's a rare treasure to find a historically imagined novel that is at once fully versed in the facts and unafraid of weaving those truths into a story that dares to explore the unanswered questions. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney's love story is--as many early reviews of Loving Frank have noted--little-known and often dismissed as scandal. In Nancy Horan's skillful hands, however, what you get is two fully realized people, entirely, irrepressibly, in love. Together, Frank and Mamah are a wholly modern portrait, and while you can easily imagine them in the here and now, it's their presence in the world of early 20th century America that shades how authentic and, ultimately, tragic their story is. Mamah's bright, earnest spirit is particularly tender in the context of her time and place, which afforded her little opportunity to realize the intellectual life for which she yearned. Loving Frank is a remarkable literary achievement, tenderly acute and even-handed in even the most heartbreaking moments, and an auspicious debut from a writer to watch. --Anne Bartholomew
I am enjoying this book but where are the photos? I had to google Mr. Wright and Mamah to find a photo and to find photos of his homes. How nice it would have been to have some photo inserts to show the man and
some of his work which was quite incredible for this time period.
writes,
A recent Amazon reviewer wished that Nancy Horan would continue her saga about Frank Lloyd Wright's relationships with women to include his third and final wife, Olgivanna. As a previous reviewer noted some time back, that book has already been published, The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman. As compelling a character as the Mamah Cheney of Loving Frank is, she pales in comparison to Olgivanna, the strange occultist that Wright met ten years after Cheney's death. Their marriage, the centerpiece of The Fellowship, lasted twenty five years until Wright's death, a period that combined extraordinary architectural achievements by Wright with a bizarre social world managed by Olgivanna. The USA Today quote printed on the back of the book is really true: "You can't top the material for richness: genius, sex, spirituality, money, mania". And though it is as engaging a story as Loving Frank, it is entirely non-fiction.
writes,
Now I wish the author would pick up where she left off and bring us up to date. Iknew him at Taliesen West when he was married to Olgivanna, and had no idea about his early years.
