Paul Hendrickson’s previous (and very fine) book was Hemingway’s Boat, published in Britain in 2012. It was a nice conceit to see the writer’s life through his singular obsession with Pilar, the boat he commissioned from a Brooklyn shipyard, which remained the steadiest companion in his choppy voyage.

The enormous life of Frank Lloyd Wright — the architect who was born two years after the Civil War, and died in 1959 when Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ was a hit — offers no such straightforward device.