SOURCE: "The Prairie in Literary Culture and The Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright," in The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Carol R. Bolon, Robert S. Nelson, and Linda Seidel, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 173-85.

In the following essay, Ziff investigates the effect of the Midwestern prairie landscape on American literature and architecture.

"My dear and honored Walt Whitman," Louis Sullivan began the letter of February 3, 1887, in which he introduced himself to the poet. When he read Leaves of Grass, he told him, "you then and there entered my soul, have not departed, and will never depart."¹ The democratic faith of Whitman, it seemed, would be justified by the art of the Midwest where it could be embodied, free of the older patterns of the colonial past from which popular democracy was never quite separate on the Atlantic seaboard. So great was Whitman's influence...