Most Popular Books by Lewis Mumford

Covers the city''s development from ancient times to the modern age.

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) is best known for his Sky Line column in the New Yorker where he served as architecture critic for over 30 years. A man of letters and part of Manhattan''s intellectual elite, Mumford wrote more than 20 books over 6 decades, bridging the seemingly disparate disciplines of architecture, technology, literary criticism, biography, sociology and philosophy.

Revealing a new side of Mumford''s remarkable personality - his formative years, this volume records how he grew up in New York City in the early 20th century, reminisces about his German extended family, his life as a penurious student, his early struggles as a writer in Greenwich Village and the events and people that shaped his thinking.

Originally published in 1957, this volume compares the 20th Century transformation of human life to the revolution which swept early man into the first civilized communities. It shows how each radical new stage of human development grew out of changes in human personality and consciousness, such as the invention of language and symbols, the origins of universal religions and the mechanization of everyday life. Despite the threat that the author foresees from an over-reliance on automation, the book maintains that humanity still has the means, spiritual, personal and technological to create a sustainable future for itself, by increasing the usefulness and freedom of all men.

"Superbly crafted little essays, Lewis Mumford''s New Yorker pieces called ''The Art Galleries'' well deserve this handsome republication. They offer supremely tasteful guided tours of the galleries and museums of Manhattan at the time when the canon of Western art, including modernism, was being secured, against a background of tension between abstraction and realism and between aestheticism and social commitment. The essays are a gift for our own troubled times from one of the great humane and versatile critics of the twentieth century; they offer the reassurance of urbanity, poise, and commitment to art as a primary social necessity."—Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Grey Emeritus Professor of English, Yale University

Buried renaissance of Root, Sullivan, Roebling, W. Homer, Eakins, Ryder, others. 12 illustrations.

Publisher Description

Their 160 letters from 1926-1958 covered a wide range of topics, including Wright''s position on the history of American architecture and contemporary practice, their friends and rivals, the invention and spread of the International Style, and political events in Europe and the United States.".

Lewis Mumford was the author of more than thirty influential books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with technics. This text provides the essence of Mumford''s views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture.

Includes new discoveries about Melville''s life and a new preface reporting the changing attitudes toward him.

This is the third volume in Lewis Mumford''s superb "Renewal of Life" series, which also contains Technics and Civilazation, The Culture of Cities, and The Conduct of Life. The present book explores the historic development of the personality and the community. Ranging from ancient Greece to our own century, the author takes Western man over the ground of his past, singles out events that have done him injury, and reveals his latent sources of creative action, too long thrust aside in an age that depends for salvation on the machine.

This is a history of the machine and a critical study of its effects on civilization. Mumford has drawn on every aspect of life to explain the machine and to trace its social results. "An extraordinarily wide-ranging, sensitive, and provocative book about a subject upon which philosophers have so far shed but little light" (Journal of Philosophy). Index; illustrations.