“Review of *Louis Sullivan, An Architect in American Thought*, by Sherman Paul”

AboutA review of Sherman Paul's study situating Louis Sullivan within the late-19th/early-20th-century American literary and intellectual tradition, alongside figures like Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Henry D. Lloyd as part of a broader "Chicago School" of social thought, not just architecture. Gebhard credits Paul's analysis of Sullivan's relationship to American Transcendentalism and pragmatism as genuinely perceptive, but argues Paul, like nearly every prior Sullivan scholar, has "succumbed to the Master," presenting an unrealistically coherent philosophical portrait rather than the "forceful, passionate...eclectic" Sullivan known through the more skeptical accounts of George Elmslie, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Gray Purcell. Gebhard also suggests Paul under-explores a more direct connection between Sullivan's philosophy (especially in *Democracy: A Man-Search*) and Nietzsche's *Thus Spake Zarathustra*, a well-worn copy of which was in Sullivan's own library.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0037-9808%28196403%2923%3A1%3C51%3ALSAAIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R