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“I have been standing on the side of life, watching it float by. I want to swim in the river. I want to feel the current.”
So writes Mamah Borthwick Cheney in her diary as she struggles to justify her clandestine love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright. Four years earlier, in 1903, Mamah and her husband, Edwin, had commissioned the renowned architect to design a new home for them. During the construction of the house, a powerful attraction developed between Mamah and Frank, and in time the lovers, each married with children, embarked on a course that would shock Chicago society and forever change their lives.
While scholars have largely relegated Mamah to a footnote in the life of America’s greatest architect, author Nancy Horan gives full weight to their dramatic love story and illuminates Cheney’s profound influence on Wright.
Drawing on years of research, Horan weaves little-known facts into a compelling narrative, vividly portraying the conflicts and struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of mother, wife, lover, and intellectual. Horan’s Mamah is a woman seeking to find her own place, her own creative calling in the world. Mamah’s is an unforgettable journey marked by choices that reshape her notions of love and responsibility, choices that ultimately lead to this novel’s stunning conclusion.
(Summary provided by the author)
Nancy Horan is the author of three novels. Loving Frank (2007) chronicles a little-known chapter in the life of legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and his client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. Loving Frank remained on the New York Times Bestseller list for over a year. It has been translated into sixteen languages and received the 2009 Prize for Historical Fiction awarded by the Society of American Historians.
Under the Wide and Starry Sky (2014) explores the unlikely relationship of Robert Louis Stevenson and his spirited American wife, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson. Horan aims to understand the past by interpreting and portraying the impact of real events on the lives of real people. Stevenson has been credited with a wise observation: “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” The author is interested in how her characters arrive at the banquet, and how they deal with the results of their choices.
The House Of Lincoln (2023) chronicles the intersecting lives of three families in Springfield, Illinois beginning in the 1850s. A Portuguese house girl for the Lincoln family narrates the struggle of her immigrant family and her experiences inside the home of the her employer; a minister and barber to Lincoln reveals the Underground Railroad activities of his free Black family; and Mary Todd Lincoln’s point of view reveals her joys and profound losses over the course of her life. Culminating in the 1908 Springfield Race Riot, The House of Lincoln documents the Civil War and its aftermath in Abraham Lincoln’s chosen hometown. The House of Lincoln is the result of the author’s journey to portray a history beneath the more familiar history of Abraham Lincoln.
A native Midwesterner, Nancy Horan was a Chicago journalist before turning to fiction writing. She now lives with her husband on an island in Puget Sound.
(Biography provided by the author)
