SOURCE: "Two Prophetic Architects: Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright," in American Autobiography, University of Massachusetts Press, 1979, pp. 120-47.

In the following essay, Couser evaluates and compares the autobiographies of Wright and his mentor Louis Sullivan, emphasizing the prophetic scheme of both works.

The contributions of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to the growth of modern architecture in America are familiar; their achievements as autobiographers are less well known. The similarities between their autobiographies should not be surprising, for the two men had closely linked careers and closely parallel lives. Both cherished their rural childhoods, yet both achieved professional maturity in the raw urban environment of Chicago, Both attributed their success as architects not to their academic education but to the influence of nature and talented contemporaries. Adapting Transcendental theories of art to architecture, they cooperated in the creation of an indigenous, modern, "democratic" architecture. Both disseminated...