The Architect of Desire Paperback - 1999
by Suzannah Lessard
In a narrative that "Publishers Weekly" called "a signal event", and "The San Francisco Chronicle" called "a haunting family history", renowned architect Stanford White's great-granddaughter Suzanne Lessard weaves together the fascinating threads of four generations into an unforgettable book that comes to terms with the family's legacy and its secrets.
First line
WHEN I WAS a little girl, I liked to go into a formal garden of box bushes that lay just to the west of my grandparents' house.
From the jacket flap
The story of Stanford White--his scandalous affair with the 16-year-old actress Evelyn Nesbit, his murder in 1906 by her husband, the millionaire Harry K. Thaw, and the hailstorm of publicity that surrounded "the trial of the century"--has proven irresistable to generations of novelists, historians, and biographers. The premier neoclassical architect of his day, White's legacy to the world were such masterpieces as New York's original Madison Square Garden, the Washington Square Arch, and the Players, Metropolitan, and Colony clubs. He was also responsible for the palaces of such clients as the Whitneys, Vanderbilts, and Pulitzers, the robber barons of the Gilded Age whose power and dominance shaped the nation in its heady ascent at the turn of the century.
As the century rolled on, however, the story of Stanford White and Evelyn Nesbit came to be viewed as glamorous and romantic, the darker narrative of White's out-of-control sexual compulsion obscured by time. Indeed, White's wife Bessie and his son Larry remained adamantly silent about the matter for the duration of their lives, a silence that reverberated through the next four generations of their extended family.
Suzannah Lessard is the eldest of Stanford White's great grandchildren. It was only in her 30's that she began to sense the parallels between the silence about her great-grandfather's life and the silence about her own perilous experience as a little girl in her own home. Thus she became drawn to the remarkable history of her family in order to uncover its hidden truths, and in so doing to liberate herself from its enclosure at last. The result is a multi-layered memoir of astonishing elegance and power, onethat, like a great building, is illumined room by room, chapter by chapter, until the whole is clearly seen.
Details
- Title The Architect of Desire
- Author Suzannah Lessard
- Binding Paperback
- Edition First Edition
- Pages 352
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Delta, New York
- Date 1999-03-31
- ISBN 9780385319423 / 0385319428
- Weight 1.17 lbs (0.53 kg)
- Dimensions 9.2 x 6.08 x 0.89 in (23.37 x 15.44 x 2.26 cm)
-
Themes
- Cultural Region: Mid-Atlantic
- Cultural Region: Northeast U.S.
- Geographic Orientation: New York
- Library of Congress subjects White, Stanford, Nesbit, Evelyn
- Dewey Decimal Code B
Media reviews
Citations
- New York Times, 10/19/1997, Page 44
- NY Times Notable Bks of Year, 01/01/1997, Page 96
- Publishers Weekly, 09/29/1997, Page 0
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The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family
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