To Frank Lloyd Wright [Letter 117]

The next year, Wright sent AR a copy of his book When Democracy Builds and inscribed it: “To Ayn Rand, who seems so much more successful with fiction than I am with fact.”

10,000 Tampa Avenue
Chatsworth, California

August 20, 1945

Dear Mr. Wright:

Thank you. I would like to think that you know how much it meant to me—receiving a book of yours from you. I look at your signature—and think that life is seldom as properly and wonderfully dramatic as this. You told me once that I couldn’t have suffered enough to write about integrity. I think I have—and this was one of my nicest rewards.

As to your inscription, I would like to say that I have never known any facts as magnificently successful as Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. So that if I succeeded with fiction, it was in great measure because these facts helped me to believe in man’s creative faculty.

I am leaving for New York on September 5th, for a month’s vacation. While there, I intend to buy land for a Frank Lloyd Wright house of my own. May I come to see you and to discuss it with you while I am in the East? If you will be at Taliesin at that time and if it is convenient for you, I should like to make the trip there. I should like very much to see you again.

Gratefully and reverently yours,

Ayn Rand