Discover the Best Books Written by Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology. 

He was influenced by the work of Scottish theorist Sir Patrick Geddes and worked closely with his associate, the British sociologist Victor Branford. Mumford was also a contemporary and friend of Frank Lloyd Wright, Clarence Stein, Frederic Osborn, Edmund N. Bacon, and Vannevar Bush. Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1912.

He studied at the City College of New York and The New School for Social Research but became ill with tuberculosis and never finished his degree. In 1918 he joined the navy to serve in World War I and was assigned as a radio electrician. He was discharged in 1919 and became associate editor of The Dial, an influential modernist literary journal. He later worked for The New Yorker, where he wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues.

Mumford's earliest books in the field of literary criticism have had a lasting influence on contemporary American literary criticism. In The Golden Day (1926), he argued for a mid-19th-century American literary canon comprising Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, all of whom he argued reflected an antebellum American culture of the period that would be destroyed by the late-19th-century social changes wrought by the American Civil War and industrialization of the United States.

Herman Melville (1929), which combined an account of Melville's life with an interpretive discussion of his work, was an important part of the Melville revival. Soon after, with the book The Brown Decades, he established himself as an authority in American architecture and urban life, which he interpreted in a social context. Mumford was a close friend of psychologist Henry Murray. He corresponded extensively from 1928 until the 1960s on topics including Herman Melville, psychology, American values and culture, and the nature of the self.

In his early writings on urban life, Mumford was optimistic about human abilities and wrote that the human race would use electricity and mass communication to build a better world for all humankind. Mumford would later take a more pessimistic stance on the sweeping technological improvements this second industrial revolution brought. His early architectural criticism also helped to bring wider public recognition to the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

In 1963, Mumford received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association for art criticism. Mumford received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1975 Mumford was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). In 1976, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. In 1986, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

He served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years. His 1961 book, The City in History, received the National Book Award. Lewis Mumford died at the age of 94 at his home in Amenia, New York, on January 26, 1990. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places nine years later. His wife Sophia died in 1997 at age 97.