The life of Louis Henri Sullivan traces a simple arc: a dramatic ascent followed by an abrupt descent. Born in 1856, Sullivan spent his early years in Boston. From his parents—an Irish violinist and a Swiss pianist—he inherited artistic leanings. From his grandfather—the dominant presence in his childhood—he inherited the broadminded outlook of New England Transcendentalism. By the time he was thirteen Sullivan had already decided on architecture as a career. A series of short educational interludes followed: he studied in 1873 for a single term at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he apprenticed briefly under the architects Frank Furness (1839-1912) in Philadelphia and William Le Baron Jenney (1832-1907) in Chicago; in 1874 he went to Paris and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the leading architectural institute of the western world. No fan of formal education—he once described his Parisian studio as...