Architectural history as often serves to mythologize celebrated architects as to examine their careers critically. The nineteenth-century Boston architect H. H. Richardson is a case in point. It was less Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer’s pioneer biography, Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, published two years after Richardson’s death in 1886, than Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times of 1936, that is the key mythologizing text. Although Kenneth A. Breisch does...