Lewis Mumford

Bio

Eugene Halton:

"Internationally renowned for his writings on cities, architecture, technology, literature, and modern life, Lewis Mumford was called "the last of the great humanists" by Malcolm Cowley. His contributions to literary criticism, architectural criticism, American studies, the history of cities, civilization, and technology, as well as to regional planning, environmentalism, and public life in America, mark him as one of the most original voices of the twentieth-century.

Born in Flushing on October 19, 1895, Mumford lived much of his life in New York, settling in Dutchess County in 1936 with his wife Sophia, in Amenia, where he died over a half-century later, on January 26, 1990. His first book, The Story of Utopias, was published in 1922, and his last book, his autobiography, Sketches from Life, was published sixty years later in 1982.

Mumford preferred to call himself a writer, not a scholar, architectural critic, historian or philosopher. His writing ranged freely and brought him into contact with a wide variety of people, including writers, artists, city planners, architects, philosophers, historians, and archaeologists. Throughout his life, Mumford sketched and painted his surroundings, visualizing his impressions of people and places in image, as his ever-present notepad visualized them in words.

Given the range of Mumford's scholarly work, it is all the more interesting that he did not have a college degree, having had to leave City College of New York after a diagnosis of tuberculosis. But if whaling was Herman Melville's Harvard and Yale, Mannahatta, as Mumford put it, was my university, my true alma mater. From childhood on, Mumford walked, sketched, and observed New York City, and its effects can be felt throughout his writings.

He was architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over thirty years, and his 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award. In 1923 Mumford was a cofounder with Clarence Stein, Benton MacKaye, Henry Wright and others, of the Regional Planning Association of America, which advocated limited-scale development and the region as significant for city planning.

By 1938 he was an ardent advocate for early American entry into what was emerging as World War Two, a war which claimed the life of his son Geddes in 1944, and was an early critic of nuclear weapons in 1946 and of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1965. In 1964 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Lewis Mumford's work underwent a continuous series of transformations as he broadened and deepened his scope. From his American studies books in the 1920s, such as The Golden Day (1926) and Herman Melville (1929), which contributed to the rediscovery of the literary transcendentalists of the 1850s and The Brown Decades (1931) which placed the architectural achievements of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright before the public, through the four-volume "Renewal of Life" series published between 1934 and 1951, which outlined the place of technics, cities, and world-views in the development of Western Civilization, to his late studies of the emergence of civilizations and the place of communication practices in human development, he boldly denied the utilitarian view while evolving his own vision of organic humanism.

Mumford's works share a common concern with the ways that modern life as a whole, although providing possibilities for broader expression and development, simultaneously subverts those possibilities and actually ends up tending toward a diminution of purpose. He shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos released a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into The Myth of the Machine, the title he used for his two-volume late work."

(https://www3.nd.edu/~ehalton/mumfordbio.html)

Publications

Books by Lewis Mumford (Listed Chronologically)

1. The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922.
2. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1934.
3. The Condition of Man. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1944.
4. Art and Technics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952
5. The Transformations of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1956.
6. The Myth of the Machine:
   1. Vol. I, Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967;
   2. Vol. II, The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1970.
7. Interpretations and Forecasts 1922-1972. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
8. Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
9. My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
10. Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. New York: Dial Press, 1982.
11. The Lewis Mumford Reader. Donald L. Miller, ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.