Walter Gropius

*A Times and New Statesman Book of the Year* *BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week* Illustrated with over 130 colour photographs and drawings 'A masterpiece.' Edmund de Waal 'Commanding, intelligent, gripping.' The Times *** From 1910 to 1930 Gropius was at the very centre of European modern art and design, as the founder of the German art school, the Bauhaus. Yet Gropius's beliefs and affiliations left him little choice but to leave Germany when Hitler came to power. In this riveting book, Fiona MacCarthy draws on new research to re-evaluate Gropius's work and life. From his shattering experiences in the First World War to his turbulent marriage to the notorious Alma Mahler and the tragic early death of their daughter, MacCarthy leads us through his disorientating years in London, to his final peaceful and productive life in America. This is biography at its finest and most vivid.

A former Guardian critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed Eric Gill (1989). Her next book, William Morris (1994), won the Wolfson History Prize. Her Byron:Life and Legend (2002) has been described as 'one of the great literary biographies of our time'. She also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011), and was awarded the OBE in 2009. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. She was married to David Mellor, one of Britain's leading industrial designers. She died in 2020 at the age of 80.