Publisher’s Summary
I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
In Loving Frank, an ambitious debut novel, fact and fiction blend together brilliantly. While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, leading inexorably ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
Elegantly written and remarkably rich in detail, Loving Frank is a fitting tribute to a courageous woman, a national icon, and their timeless love story.
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Novel Activities to Pair with Loving Frank
Fans of architecture will love paring Loving Frank with a tour of any one of the great American architect’s masterpieces. You could head to the Driftless Region of southwestern Wisconsin to tour, among other things, the home shared by Wright and Borthwick. Taliesin is the home, studio, school, and 800-acre estate of Frank Lloyd Wright and was designated a UNESCO World-Heritage Site in July 2019. It contains examples of architecture from nearly every decade of Wright’s 60 year long career.
If you are in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, take a tour of Beth Sholom Synagogue, home to a Conservative Jewish Congregation. The synagogue opened in 1959 and is the only synagogue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Within a few years of its completion, Beth Sholom was singled out by the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation as one of the seventeen Wright buildings most worthy of preservation. Wright died only months before the synagogue’s dedication. He also designed the Guggenheim in NYC around the same time.
All in all, Wright designed over 1,000 structures in his lifetime, including the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, the Johnson Wax corporate headquarters in Wisconsin, and Fallingwater, a private home near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that became the most famous house designed in the 20th century. Loving Frank. Any one of these Frank Lloyd Wright buildings worthy of a road trip would make the perfect novel activity to pair with reading Loving Frank.
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