Background
Common wisdom had it that, at sixty, Frank Lloyd Wright, though a grand old man, was history. This construction, not surprisingly, enraged him. Here he expresses frustration with “his obituaries” and declares, “for the sake of the cause - "Architecture” -, that he wants to “to arise and fight.” What he intends to do, in fact, is stage that “favored American institution,” the comeback. “From now on,” he tells Mumford, “you are to find me actively engaged in that performance.” To this end he invites Mumford to use his “clear head, good pen and good heart” to help him repel the “European invasion of our own Country” in which architects are coming “to teach us what we have been successfully teaching them.”
Wright did indeed stage a comeback; he began, in the 1930s, a remarkable professional renaissance.
