Beschreibung:

WRIGHT, FRANK LLOYD. Nine autograph letters signed, two typed letters signed, and one postcard signed to his daughter Catherine Wright Baxter one ALS and one TLS to her husband Kenneth Baxter, two ALsS and one telegram to his first wife Catherine Tobin Wright, and three TLsS and one telegram to his granddaughter Anne Baxter, most signed "Father" or "Frank", written from various places including Spring Green, Wisconsin, Chicago, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, 1909-1954. Together 19 letters and two telegrams, approximately 51 pages, 12mo-4to, nine letters on Wright's personal printed or embossed stationery with his orange square emblem, two from Tokyo on Imperial Hotel stationery, 11 letters with original stamped envelopes addressed by Wright, a few short fold breaks, one letter with minor tape repairs ; with one TLS from his son Lloyd Wright to Anne Baxter, 24 June 1974, one page, 4to . "YOU ARE THE DAUGHTER OF A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF--AND THAT HAS FALLEN" A dramatic and revealing series of family letters, documenting Wright's tumultuous and often painful relations with the children of his first marriage and his confused sentiments toward their mother Catherine Tobin Wright after their separation in 1909. Following his failed attempts to persuade her to let their six children spend time with him, Wright's letters to his daughter Catherine reveal a man deeply concerned about his children's well-being, but whose guilt at having left them and bitterness at their estrangement were at times unjustly directed against them, in repeated and lengthy recriminations for their selfishness and ingratitude. Chicago, [n.d., envelope postmarked 16 Sept. 1912]: "...it isn't likely that anyone could turn me against my own children were they ever so determined to do so--and in this case you wholly misunderstand the feeling of Mrs. Borthwick [his companion Mamah Borthick Cheney, who was killed in the first fire at Wright's house Taliesin in 1914] toward you all. Naturally she feels that she is in a way keeping my children away from me and it is a sorrow to her I am sure--just as it was to me to feel that I in the same way was keeping her children from her...I know she would be happy to have you children with me whenever you cared to come...There is more than one possible basis for parents and children to get good from one another. The regular basis in our case has been lost--let us see if we can't set up one that, tho calling for more restraint, more circumspection and consideration--has yet fine qualities..." [Spring Green], 15 May 1914: Reproaching Catherine for having made frivolous use of her time in New York City, where he had sent her to stay with his sister Maginel and her husband: "...It seems that your time is spent in the old proposition of pleasuring oneself anyhow... I didn't send you to New York to continue the 'Vaudeville Follies' idea of life that you seem to be drifting toward. It will leave you a discredited, cheap, spent affair before you are thirty with nothing to go on afterward..You see such women around you by the thousand--the ones who tried to beat the game of life by shirking work ...There is no short cut by which you can succeed in any artistic calling without more hard, grinding, plain everyday work than you would find in any other pursuit, that of wife and mother not excepted..." [Spring Green, n.d., envelope postmarked 1 and 3 August 1914]: "...were you to be a daughter of mine in spirit as well as in the flesh you would only be an unhappiness to your mother--while if you remain as you are--a daughter of hers in the spirit you can only be a disappointment to me. This is the misfortune which has befallen us all...There is much in me that would be helpful to you were it not considered...canceled by the harm the circumstances of my life might do you...I want you to do anything in which you will put your whole heart. No sacrifice I can make would be too much to provide the means for your doing so...I have always indul