To maintain his Olympian position as the self-described inventor of modern architecture, he could admit to no other interest or influence, or acknowledge any work but his own. We know now that he was an omnivorous reader, in part to compensate for an erratic education, and that he was an avid collector of the latest books and periodicals on art and architecture. He was intensely aware of everything that was going on and immediately receptive to it; he never doubted his own role as an active participant in a period of great creative change. He did not miss a nuance or beat of what was happening abroad.
— Ada Louise Huxtable, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life. It’s fascinating to see how Wright was so profoundly captivated by the Romantic myth of the solitary genius that he hid, in his lifetime quite successfully, his relentlessly wide-ranging curiosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary developments in architecture. How enlightening it would have been to hear Wright’s commentary on all those movements — but he kept all his thoughts to himself lest someone discover that he knew the work of any other architects.
