"Night after night they would all stand naked in the trees at the old farm. You could see them if you rode along the highway at night. The higher up they were, the closer they felt to God. But you wouldn’t believe all the stuff that went on down there. It was some kind of cult started by this Gurdjieff guy—nudity, free sex, just about everything you could imagine, and more. And they were all under the influence of this crazy poet—what’s his name—Toomer? There were lots of important people from town and elsewhere.… Prominent people. People you’d never expect to see down there."
"The minute she saw the tall, red-haired young man enter the auditorium, her "heart leapt." It was not love at first sight; on the contrary, in Webb Joyce recognized a sinister, terrifying figure from a repeated nightmare of her childhood. In her dream, a tall, red-haired young schoolmaster asked Joyce to fetch something from a forbidding tower. Frightened of entering the tower alone, she nevertheless obeyed. Halfway up, in a desolate, empty room, the schoolmaster, raving mad, charged in and threw himself at Joyce. She woke each night, sweating and terrified. Now more than 40 years later, the ‘mad schoolmaster’ had come to her lecture."
"On August 15, 1914 Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two young children, Martha aged 9 and John aged 11, and four workmen were brutally murdered at Taliesin, the Wisconsin home that Frank Lloyd Wright had built for himself and Mamah. Julian Carlton, a 30-year old servant from Barbados, locked all the exits, set fire to the home, and then waited, axe in hand, for the terrified people to try to escape. Two others were able to escape alive, but too wounded, to run for help. Wright was in Chicago at the time."
Table of Contents
Author’s Introduction
Chapter 1 · Frank Lloyd Wright
Chapter 2 · Ogilvanna
Chapter 3 · The Great Gurdjieff
Chapter 4 · Zona Gale
Chapter 5 · Margery Latimer
Chapter 6 · Jean Toomer
Chapter 7 · Portage Experiment
Chapter 8 · End of a Dream
Chapter 9 · The Damned
