This dissertation is an investigation of the ways Frank Lloyd Wright came to be a portrait, model, and architect of the American self during the twentieth century. I argue, contrary to the dominant hagiographic narratives of Wright-as-genius, that Frank Lloyd Wright cannot be understood according to the biographical arc that he personally established—an isolated arc that begins in mythic predestination and ends with a singular cultural hero—that has become the epistemological foundation for understanding Wright’s role in American and architectural history. This dissertation is structured around different notions of Wright’s self in three specific sites in order to show the inextricable relationships between his evolving consciousness, the evolving consciousness of the nation, and the role the professions of architecture and architectural history played in connecting them. Those three sites—Nature, Business and Education, and Government—are also the sites that defined American exceptionalism, sites wherein America’s own narrative was crafted and her subjects created. In each case, a particular notion of the self gets mobilized in the context of professional practice and in service to an ideology of American identity. In this dissertation’s narrative arc, Wright moves from embodied self—a self that is possessed—to a disembodied self—a self that is dispossessed but no less real—that parallels the historical narrative of the nation’s own self-construction. It examines how the twentieth-century constructions of both Wright and America are predicated on and also reproduced the idea of American exceptionalism. This is an investigation of that conjuncture of architecture, self, and nation—revealing, in the process, how Architecture became American, how an architect became a genius, and how a nation became a self.